Who is the most overderrated person in history? Henry VIII. Nasty piece of work and not as clever as he thought he was.’ ...

Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert looks beyond the cities to the coffee and cotton that fuelled a global market.

Bede wrote that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain en masse in the fifth century. Does the evidence agree?

In 480 BC a vast Persian army under king Xerxes crossed into Greece. The invasion was triggered by Athens’ defeat of a Persian army at Marathon ten years earlier, but this was a far bigger force and ...

On 1 July 1903 a publicity stunt for a sporting paper cycled into history as the first Tour de France. Cycle racing was all the rage. The Paris-Brest-Paris race was launched in 1891. (Its inaugural ...

It marked a turning point in the Cold War: the president of the United States had just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The US military’s top brass were furious, having ...

The Japanese drive to become a great power required the domination of China. They defeated the Chinese in war in the 1890s and took away Korea. They soon infiltrated Manchuria, which had rich reserves ...

Chaucer’s meadows are romantic landscapes of leisurely frolicking. But for medieval haymakers July meant a month of hard graft. For the past few years the first Saturday in July has been marked by ...

The party was born of hostility to slavery. Back in 1820, the US Congress had agreed the Missouri Compromise, under which Missouri entered the Union as a slave state, but slavery was forbidden ...

The week-long hurricane that struck the south of England and the English Channel on November 24th, 1703, was beyond anything in living memory. The week-long hurricane that struck the south of England ...

At the outset of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference Japan enjoyed a seat at the top table, but the vexed issue of racial equality set it and its notional Western allies on different paths. The Treaty of ...

In 1856 the classical scholar Henry Liddell, of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, moved into Christ Church, Oxford, where he had been appointed dean. With him were his wife and their sizeable ...