In Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco, Tim Blanning restores the ‘incorrigible Saxon’ to ...

Samplers, pieces of embroidery made to practise or demonstrate needlework stitches, were an important part of girls’ education for centuries. In Britain, girls stitched samplers from the 17th to the ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of ...

Except for aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. There are people who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were really by the Earl of Oxford, that JFK was ...

The 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 no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

Donald Trump’s electoral comeback has provoked a lot of analysis from political scientists. Historians have been slower to engage with the subject. By temperament they are inclined to seek a longer ...

Individuals are not happy in proportion to the amount of space their persons occupy. Yet certain nations, at certain periods of their history, seem to take it for granted that the wider they spread ...

In September 1781, Thomas Hughes, then 22, visited Brighton for what he hoped would be a restorative holiday. It was not his first trip: such sojourns were common for Hughes. But on this occasion ...

On 2 August 1274 Edward, the eldest son of Henry III, returned to England from the Crusades. He had been gone for four long years and much had happened in his absence. Most obviously, his father had ...

Born in 1654 to the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Elizabeth Cavendish was the eldest of six children. Granddaughter to both Civil War general William Cavendish and prominent MP William ...

Political reputations are forged by actions, but the long view of history can be hard to predict. Britons Caught in the French Revolution As Revolution broke out and turned to Terror, British citizens ...