From imported plant species to water pollution, Britain’s 19th century wool trade transformed the world. I n the early 1910s ...

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

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 ...

The Soldier’s Reward: Love and War in the Age of the French Revolution and Napoleon by Jennifer Ngaire Heuer and Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France by Andrea Mansker ...

Paul I of Russia was the son and successor of Catherine the Great, who took the Romanov throne away from her feeble-minded husband, Tsar Peter III, and had him killed in 1762, an event which ever ...

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 ...

Walter Whitman was born on May 31st, 1819 in Long Island, New York, the second of nine children and grew up in Brooklyn. He did not receive much in the way of education, working as a printer, ...

The central character of Christopher Marlowe’s bloodthirsty and hugely popular drama Tamburlaine the Great, in which the fall of Damascus is a major episode, was the savage Turkic warlord the Persians ...

How Frederick Louis, the eldest son of George II and Queen Caroline, came to meet his death, a few weeks after his forty-fourth birthday, is not quite certain. A keen games player, he was struck hard ...

The British film magnate J. Arthur Rank, who put up close to £600,000 to finance Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, was not unnaturally nervous about how much of it he would ever see back. All visitors were ...