Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that when it comes to sexuality ...

The remarkable fall of absinthe: from 19th-century ‘Green Fairy’ to scourge of society.

The Chinese folk tale The Snail-Shell Girl tells the story of a poor man who falls in love with a beautiful woman who lives in a shell, their path to happiness thwarted by an evil landlord. Adapted ...

The earliest representation of the turkey in Europe is ‘a turkey-cock in his pride proper’, requested by the Yorkshireman William Strickland when he applied for his family’s coat of arms in 1550. Can ...

Nile Green is Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA and author of Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (W.W. Norton) In the mid-1500s, the ...

Over Christmas 1941 newspaper readers around Britain were gripped by headlines screaming ‘Escaped German’ and ‘German Escapee’. ‘Soldiers Hunt 6ft. German’, claimed the Daily Mail, who warned that the ...

Few events have symbolised the strength of Iranian soft power quite as effectively as an activist in Chicago last April urging his attentive American audience of ‘trainee protesters’ to chant ‘marg ...

The period sometimes referred to as the ‘second Viking Age’ witnessed a new intensification of Scandinavian attacks on England, starting with the English defeat at the Battle of Maldon in 991 and ...

Every September two friends and I go on pilgrimage. They are both pretty devout – one is a priest. I am indulged as a wistful agnostic. Growing enthusiasm for the Camino de Santiago over recent ...

For those who sought their services, there were many professional female detectives in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, and not just in London – you could find them in Bristol, in Cardiff and in ...

The British colonisers who travelled to India from the 18th century onwards were steeped in the Classics; they knew their Greek and Latin (if not the languages of India) and quoted liberally from ...

The mystery of what happened to the Marie Celeste gripped me as a child. It’s nice to have some mysteries in life though. Lucy Noakes is Rab Butler Chair in Modern History at the University of Essex ...