T he thing I’d like most in the world’, says the reader in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), ‘is to make clocks run backwards.’ And underst ...

Faisal Devji takes the last approach, focusing on what he sees as a global transformation in the way the term Islam was used ...

E dith-Matilda or Matilda II of England is best remembered as ‘Good Queen Maud’, the wife of Henry I and patron of the 12th ...

Cecil’s clause did not detail any line of succession, but was instead an interregnum clause. Highly detailed, it outlined a ...

Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy by Carol Chillington Rutter is a case study of the archetypal early modern ...

Why are you a historian of the pre-modern Balkans and Turkey? I was born in Bulgaria, but as an undergraduate in the UK I ...

The death-knell of the Chartist movement in Britain sounded on what was meant to be its day of triumph. In a year when thrones tottered and regimes quailed as revolutions broke out all over Europe, ...

Edward Wightman was well-known in Puritan circles in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire in the early 1600s, where he began proclaiming increasingly heretical opinions. He reportedly did not believe that ...

The North Atlantic Treaty, signed by twelve nations on a Monday afternoon in Washington DC, saw the United States accept the lead in the free world's postwar resistance to Communist aggression and ...

On 19 October 1984 Father Jerzy Popiełuszko was invited to celebrate mass and lead the rosary in a parish in the city of Bydgoszcz, northern Poland. Soon after 9pm the priest, with his driver and ...

King Carol spent his last years in exile in Mexico and Brazil before buying a villa at Estoril in Portugal. His sudden death there of a heart attack, aged fifty-nine, removed from the scene a ...

Although it lasted less than two years, the courage, stamina and resourcefulness of its young riders, careering day and night across prairies, mountains and deserts, heedless of storms, accidents and ...