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

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

Italy’s entry into the Great War in 1915 prompted 300,000 men to return to their homeland to join the fight. Were they ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

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 ...

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received. ‘The Big Hop’ by David Rooney review Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First ...

‘D id you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, sir?’ The question came from a 14-year-old boy on a school tour of the Minoan Room at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1936. The man being addressed was ...

In 1453 the Orthodox city of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, fell to the forces of Mehmed II. Christians fled and the city began its transformation into the seat of the Ottoman ...

On June 23rd, 1700, at Hampton Court Palace, William III knighted the financier Solomon de Medina – the first member of the Jewish community to be thus honoured: it would be 137 years before another ...

The Hanseatic League, or Hansa, began as a northern European trading confederation in the middle of the 13th century. It continued for some 300 years. Its network of alliances grew to 170 cities and ...