Caught between the antagonistic states of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is stuck in geopolitical limbo. Its location – and its ...

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle ...

A new book for the new year is an old British custom, but an old book can be even better.

Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning ...

So when Raúl Castro called for an end to the embargo based on economic and humanitarian grounds in late December, he was ...

As convicts celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday on remote Norfolk Island, debates raged over the purpose of punishment and ...

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England found out about procreation the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that when it comes to sexuality and gender, scripture is often contradictory.

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 forced the Japanese government into unconditional surrender and the country, which was in a state of collapse, was occupied by ...

Silent Night, or Stille Nacht in its original German, is one of the best known songs in the world, but few know anything of its authors. Its lyrics were written in 1816 by a somewhat loose-living ...

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he ...

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born at Hanau in the electorate of Hesse-Kassel in Germany in 1785 and 1786, respectively. They were the greatest figures of the new intellectual interest in folk tales ...