Lockwood’s This Land of Promise examines the memoirs and biographies of a selection of prominent refugees from the 16th to ...

A quiet, shy man, the unfortunate John Byng was no coward – he faced his death with cool courage – but he seems to have been too cautious, passive and defeatist for command in the British navy. He ...

Less famous than its 1215 predecessor, the Magna Carta of 1225 held the true power.

Rome’s first theatre was an enormous spectacle intended to glorify Pompey’s successes. Was it all bread and circuses? I n the ...

On 9 March 1522 the Swiss Reformation began with an ‘ostentatious eating of sausages.’ T he Reformation in Switzerland began ...

On 5 March 1936 the prototype Spitfire made its maiden flight. Its creator R.J. Mitchell would not live to see its finest ...

This superbly ominous story is the earliest English record of the legend of the Wild Hunt. This legend, found in folklore ...

Viv Sanders takes issue with some all too common assumptions. Graham Goodlad reviews the controversial career of William Pitt the Elder, whose ascendancy coincided with Britain’s involvement in the ...

In its first two centuries of existence Christianity witnessed the persecution of many of its members by officials of the Roman Empire; the causes of these persecutions have been and continue to be ...

The rapid surrender of Japan in 1945 certainly suggested that the United States possessed the most decisive of weapons. Indeed there is reason to suspect that the real purpose in using them was less ...

A study of the hostile legends, immortalized in Shakespeare’s tragic drama, that have gathered around the real historical figure of Macbeth. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, king of scots, was a real person; ...

Carl Peter Thunberg, the Swedish botanist and traveller, who first visited the Cape of Good Hope in 1772, wrote that it “may with propriety be stiled an inn for travellers to and from the East Indies, ...