General elections in Britain were once weeks-long affairs of corruption and chaos. The shift to one-day polling was slow. Soldiers on the front line in France and Flanders saw their fight as the only ...

In Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco, Tim Blanning restores the ‘incorrigible Saxon’ to ...

Samplers, pieces of embroidery made to practise or demonstrate needlework stitches, were an important part of girls’ education for centuries. In Britain, girls stitched samplers from the 17th to the ...

Except for aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. There are people who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were really by the Earl of Oxford, that JFK was ...

The sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of the controversial satirist and philosopher. Imagine a beehive. The ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

Individuals are not happy in proportion to the amount of space their persons occupy. Yet certain nations, at certain periods of their history, seem to take it for granted that the wider they spread ...

Born in 1654 to the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Elizabeth Cavendish was the eldest of six children. Granddaughter to both Civil War general William Cavendish and prominent MP William ...

Donald Trump’s electoral comeback has provoked a lot of analysis from political scientists. Historians have been slower to engage with the subject. By temperament they are inclined to seek a longer ...

On 2 August 1274 Edward, the eldest son of Henry III, returned to England from the Crusades. He had been gone for four long years and much had happened in his absence. Most obviously, his father had ...

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic. Many thought that America was determined to destroy them; some felt it ...