As Malaya headed towards independence, the spectre of identity politics loomed. What place for cosmopolitan Penang and its ...

On 13 February 1692 the Macdonalds of Glencoe were put to the sword by troops loyal to William III. Nobody was held to ...

N o premodern poet praised coffee with greater passion than the North African jurist-poet Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi (d.1576). As ...

During the Crimean War soldiers died in appalling conditions, but the treatment of enemy prisoners was surprisingly humane.

Joan of Arc was put on trial twice, once before and once after her death. The records made at these trials are often used as evidence of Joan’s own words – but whose voice was really recorded?

In the fight against rising river pollution by big corporations, legal cases have had to get creative. O n 8 October 2025 nearly 4,000 people joined a claim submitted to the High Court. Described in ...

Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London.

The Campo de’ Fiori, near the spot where Julius Caesar was murdered, is Rome’s marketplace and also the place where heretics were executed. It was there that the faggots were piled high for the ...

It wasn’t exactly a motto, but they liked it nonetheless. ‘The sword is our Pope’, the Livonian Knights said, ‘and it is a Pope that is never far from you.’ Formerly known as the Sword Brothers, the ...

Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid caliphs from the eighth century. In 1248, however, Genghis Khan’s grandson Möngke became great khan of the Mongols and resolved to extend his sway to the Middle ...

Henry VII’s queen lies buried beside him in Westminster Abbey in a magnificent marble tomb provided by their son, Henry VIII. The face of her effigy may have been based on her death mask, taken when ...

Anticipating the events of thirty-six years later, the Japanese launched a sudden, surprise attack on the Russian naval base of Port Arthur on the coast of Manchuria without the formality of declaring ...