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 ...

Rather than a catalogue of a fanciful past, Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present by Owen Davies and Ceri ...

a Curiosity to taste the Juice, or Matter contain’d in one of the little Cystis’s or Glands of the same, which he did by ...

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 ...

A Concise History breaks off these later accretions and unearths their long history. Runes’ primary function as an alphabetic writing system is underlined throughout, as part of the ‘uphill battle’ ...

Unreason reigned supreme in Zurich on 5 February 1916 as Dada made its debut at the Cabaret Voltaire. B y February 1916 Lenin was staying in a shabby quarter of Zurich. He lived next to a butcher’s on ...

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 ...

‘Demo-cracy’: power/might of the demos. ‘Demo-sthenes’: strength to/for/with the demos. Demosthenes’ father may have been unimaginative – he had himself been named ‘Demosthenes’ – but like the famous ...

British servicemen overseas bought sex, sometimes in brothels run by the British army. In the 1970s they began to talk about it. Finished by the First World War and buried under the nation states that ...

London, Hereford and Oxford have all laid claim to Pepys’ ‘pretty witty Nell’ – he also called her ‘a bold merry slut’ -- but she was probably a native Londoner, born close to the scene of her future ...