Contemporary accounts leave little ambiguity about the character of the 17th century. Natural disasters, warfare, political unrest and rebellion combined to bring about levels of mortality,...
Children often envy orphans. But the appeal of stories of parentless heroes who are free to make their own luck fades as the fluid possibilities of youth harden into adulthood. The quirks and...
When an Icelandic volcano looks as if it’s about to blow, the flurry of anxiety in our age of entitlement is focused on the potential disruption to European airspace and whether or not...
A common and still widely accepted story of the origin of the Second World War is that it was the direct result of what happened in 1919 at the end of the Great War. The French were...
The 20th century was the age of genocide. Many periods in history have seen acts of murderous violence committed on racial grounds, but none has witnessed so many, on such a large scale, or so...
At the height of spy mania during the First World War, two British agents were sent to East Anglia in a car fitted with a Marconi radio receiver. Their aim was to intercept illicit messages...
In March 1718, 13-year-old William Murray, the 11th of Viscount Stormont’s 14 children, set off from the family seat at Scone, near Perth, on a pony. The journey to London, which he made...
The 18th century was a great age for criminals. Western European countries were awash with more private wealth than ever before, but their police forces remained weak, at least by modern...
The Prince was walking up and down in silence. He caught me by the hands and said: ‘Oh! say there is surely not going to be “warr” (pronouncing it like “far”). Dear,...
The district of Blackfriars, a squeeze of old streets between Ludgate Hill and the north bank of the Thames, takes its name from the Dominican monastery built there in the 13th century. The...
When Marie-Antoinette couldn’t sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before...
The notion that toil, ability and ambition might be enough in themselves to propel the humblest of citizens from log cabin to White House is a vital ingredient in the American Dream. Indeed,...
Lampy, just a couple of inches tall, is the last of his tribe, and is now immured in a glass cabinet a long way from his German homeland. He was one of the porcelain Gnomen-Figuren brought to...
For Europeans of a liberal disposition, the Code Napoléon was a call to modernise not merely the law but society in its entirety.
After the Islamic State astonished its enemies by sweeping through Iraq’s second city, Mosul, the self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared in a mosque to give a victory...
When I imagine the Greek gods on Olympus I conjure up a lofty polished marble palace with colonnades and porticos open to the air, its Ionic and Corinthian capitals picked out in gold, rather...
Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two major exhibitions in London take stock of German identity, history and memory, each in its own way providing a powerful reminder of the...
In 1802, the young Humphry Davy introduced his first full course of chemistry lectures at the Royal Institution by addressing the fear that science was a Trojan horse for social or political...