After becoming the first human to orbit Earth, Yuri Gagarin was transformed into a global celebrity and sent around the world as the smiling face of Soviet power. But what did the cosmonaut make of ...

More than two centuries before Richard III would be accused of killing his own nephews, the Princes in the Tower, another ...

When Alexander the Great died in Babylon in 323 BC, he was preparing ships, armies and supply networks for a new phase of ...

Edward Colston gave millions in today's money to schools, almshouses and charitable causes, carefully crafting an image of ...

Behaving well as a host or visitor wasn’t just a matter of etiquette for the ancient Greeks – it was a sacred duty. Hilary Mitchell explores xenia, the ancient code of hospitality at the heart of Chri ...

Test your knowledge with our general knowledge weekly history quiz... This page contains content provided by Riddle. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as Riddle may use cookies and ...

Borley Rectory was a large, red-brick house that stood in rural Essex. It was draughty and unkempt, and the subject of many local rumours. Nearby villagers referred to strange, ghostly figures that ...

Q: How and when did the Roman Republic first come about? A: The Roman Republic actually went through a series of phases, which historians usually refer to as the early, mid and late Republic. The ...

What did the samurai of Japan actually do? It’s a simple question, but one that is surprisingly hard to answer. In the first stages of the samurai era, from the 12th century and up to the late 15th ...

History is written by the victors, it’s said. Certainly, much of what we know about the early story of Paris dates from the conquest of Gaul under Julius Caesar, who wrote about the capital of the ...

Margaret Campbell, the famously beautiful Duchess of Argyll, had been a celebrity – and a source of scandal – from even before her debutante days. But she would be remembered for just one thing: the ...