Early 17th-century machines were intricate, impressive, responsive, and lively in equal measure. Even so, for Descartes just ...

How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy ...

Britain’s first book-of-the-month club – the Book Society – brought reading to a vast new audience. But not without some ...

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

In Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England Hillary Taylor listens in the archives for the voices of ordinary ...

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David ...

The final, tense meeting between the sage and the tyrant was steeped in animosity, to judge by the account in Plato’s Third ...

On 5 July 1852 the curtain came down on Barney Barnato, one of the richest men in South Africa.

In 1968, Fatah, the Palestinian political party, published its first series of protest posters. Clenched fists, raised arms, ammunition belts, bayonets, rifles – these posters were statements of ...

There can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in British history. Whether the subject be Georgian architecture, Victorian literature, or Tudor religious culture, we find ourselves ...

A huge bestseller and undisputed guide to the Nazi worldview, did Germans actually read Mein Kampf?

By the 14th century Christianity had swept many of Europe’s indigenous religions aside, but not all. At the continent’s peripheries paganism survived and, in some cases, thrived.