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.

Chaucer’s meadows are romantic landscapes of leisurely frolicking. But for medieval haymakers July meant a month of hard ...

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

On 12 September 1919, the rubber-faced poet-aviator Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italian nationalism’s propagandist-in-chief, swooped into the port of Fiume (now Rijeka) on the Adriatic and claimed it for ...

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 ...

The son of a weakling father and in turn the father of a weakling son, Edward I was one of the most formidable and effective of all English kings. Standing six foot two inches tall, he had an ...

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 ...

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 ...