Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book is ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della ...

Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918-1941 is a tale of three cities linked by ...

The vagaries of palace politics are notoriously difficult to record. Historians should pay attention to rumour. D onald Trump ...

If there is one statesman who stands out as not only a Russian but also a European figure in the last years of Tsarism it is assuredly Sergei Witte. Not for nothing is the last decade of the ...

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of ...

T he sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was ...

The first year of Edward I’s reign saw waves of strictures placed on a Jewish community in an already perilous situation. It set the path to their expulsion.

How many planets are there? As with the discovery of Uranus, the answer depends on who you ask. Detail from Joseph Wright of ...

The legacy of empire brought nearly half a million blacks and Asians to Britain in the fifties in search of a better life.

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic ...