T he sums are eye-watering. In 991 the English king Æthelred paid the Vikings £10,000 to stop them sacking the east coast of ...

Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes by William M. Schniedewind asks what authorship meant to the hidden ...

Robert Clive’s death has long been attributed to suicide. What is the evidence?

Toothbrushing has been a regular part of most people’s daily routines since the mid-20th century, but it was only a few decades earlier that the British state first began to impress upon the public ...

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women and God’s Own Gentlewoman bring the real world of medieval women out of the margins. Margery Kempe gave up her duties as a wife and ...

In the late 70s AD Marcus Cerrinius Vatia ran for the lower magisterial office of aedile in the ancient city of Pompeii. More than 80 inscriptions, painted on the walls of the city’s buildings, record ...

In November 1954 the East German author Max Zimmering travelled from the GDR to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). His route was arduous. From East Berlin he flew to Warsaw, then on to ...

In April 1605 the Court of Star Chamber – the Privy Council sitting in its judicial capacity – heard a curious case. As in all cases tried in this prerogative court, evidence was produced by means of ...

In the first of a new series, we ask historians one of the burning questions of the day.

Donald Trump has often been likened to Aaron Burr, described as ‘one of the most unprincipled men in the United States’. His isolationism, however, owes more to Thomas Jefferson.

Lost Countries of South America, Laurence Blair makes the case for the region. Blair, a British journalist living in Paraguay, tells the stories of nine South American ‘nations’ that either broke up, ...