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 ...

‘The risks are acute when we turn to traditional periodisations’ Levi Roach is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Exeter There can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in ...

On 11 April 1942, during one of Hitler’s habitual monologues before his inner circle at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ headquarters in East Prussia, talk turned to Alfred Rosenberg’s book The Myth of the Twentieth ...

In the summer of 1668 commissioners of the Swedish Lutheran Church arrived in the parish of Maarja-Magdaleena in northern Estonia. On Midsummer’s Eve (23 June) the commissioners witnessed how the ...