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

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

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

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

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 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 ...

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 ...

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley follows in the footsteps of those who fled fascism. Perhaps you’ve heard the stories ...

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels finds that the son of God is more than the sum of his parts. In the New Testament, Jesus is a charismatic miracle healer. He ...

It was the greatest contest in the history of art – and arguably the most mysterious too. The year was 1401 and in Florence, the ‘home’ of the Renaissance, uncertainty reigned. Still reeling from an ...

The Earth was created in seven days. On which day were the dinosaurs made? Discoveries in geology and palaeontology forced Victorian creationists to be especially creative. When Samuel Pepys’ diary ...

In June 1925 a sarcophagus was discovered in Dorset’s Sherborne Abbey and widely reported to be that of ‘Ethelbert’, a ninth-century king of Wessex. Decades of speculation followed, before, in 1952, ...