Before the Library of Alexandria there was the Library of Ashurbanipal – an Assyrian king who collected the knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia under one roof. This incredible library was forgotten for ...

The Nazi camps at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were liberated on 11 and 15 April 1945 respectively. In the week that followed, graphic photographs and descriptions of the horrors found by Allied ...

Seasoned readers of this column may recall an earlier appreciation of the benefits of boredom, specifically when it is brought on by reading less-than-compelling history books. But reading is not the ...

How did early modern millers get their bad reputations? B y the end of the medieval period millers had poor reputations.

Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England by Martyn Percy takes the British Empire’s church militant to task. Is ...

In the early 1910s a young woman set out every day to walk the river banks near Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. Ida Hayward was recording something extraordinary: the arrival in the UK of hundreds ...

Buddhism: A Journey Through History by Donald S. Lopez Jr. swiftly soon loses sight of the Buddha himself. Is that a bad ...

The British had expected to be fighting the French, in face of the aggressive policies of the Emperor Napoleon III. Instead, their first European war since 1815 found the two old enemies bizarrely ...

Early in 1801 the British war against France under Napoleon as First Consul was not going well and the country was sick of it. When the Younger Pitt’s government fell in February, the new premier was ...

Eager to be first in line, the astute James VI of Scotland responded to the question of the English succession with a war of ...