Bolesław Chrobry was finally crowned king of Poland on 18 April 1025. It was an elevation two decades in the making. Otto III ...

James II is generally considered to have been one of the worst of English kings. Recently, two American historians have incidentally had something to say in his defence. But in earlier times, ...

As Christianity spread, it carried Catherine of Siena’s legacy to the Americas. Her asceticism inspired Rose of Lima, Kateri ...

From a Gaelic perspective, however, it is clear that Ossian is a manifestation of a well-attested tradition that existed long ...

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud ...

Anyone who frequents parties held by Dutch people in festive mood from The Hague to Hong Kong knows that sooner or later the participants are liable to break into the tuneful strains of “the Triumphal ...

Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King by Gareth Russell illuminates the inner life and passions of James VI ...

Patricia Fara is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a columnist at History Today.

The author of A Relation of the Island of Britain, who is generally supposed to have been Trevisan, a member of the household of the Venetian ambassador to the first Tudor monarch, wrote of the Welsh ...

William Wallace and Robert the Bruce were the architects, not of Scotland, but of Scottish nationalism. Scotland grew, as it seems, out of a Pictish confederacy into a Celtic kingdom that retreated ...

More than a million Indians fought for Britain in the First World War, 60,000 of whom were killed. In the immediate aftermath of the war, pressure for Indian independence mounted. Early in April 1919 ...

‘Larger than a peahen and smaller than a peacock’, Jahangir wrote in 1612. Geoffrey Powell describes how the bird reached England from America some decades before the Indian knew it. Geoffrey Powell ...