Caught between the antagonistic states of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is stuck in geopolitical limbo. Its location – and its ...

Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning ...

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle ...

The rules for young officers at West Point Military Academy in New York were strict. Alcohol possession could lead to expulsion and even smoking tobacco could affect one’s chances of graduating. Of ...

A new book for the new year is an old British custom, but an old book can be even better.

Silent Night, or Stille Nacht in its original German, is one of the best known songs in the world, but few know anything of its authors. Its lyrics were written in 1816 by a somewhat loose-living ...

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 forced the Japanese government into unconditional surrender and the country, which was in a state of collapse, was occupied by ...

Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, which lasted from 1096 to 1099. Jonathan Phillips examines the origins and motives of the first Crusaders. Jonathan Phillips explains how Damascus, ‘Paradise ...

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he ...

On 10 December 1948, after months of negotiation led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ...

We were saddened to hear about the death of Eric Ives, Emeritus Professor of English History at the University of Birmingham, who passed away on September 25th. He was 81. A regular contributor to ...

So when Raúl Castro called for an end to the embargo based on economic and humanitarian grounds in late December, he was ...