I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

T here can be no doubt that monarchs bulk inordinately large in British history. Whether the subject be Georgian architecture, Victorian literature, or Tudor religious culture, we find ourselves ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

How did Western Europe learn of the fall of Constantinople, the loss of Negroponte, and the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto? In the ...

Italy’s entry into the Great War in 1915 prompted 300,000 men to return to their homeland to join the fight. Were they Italian enough for Italy?

In the summer of 1992 a senior British army officer was given the chance to visit Russia and Kyrgyzstan. His trip would have been unthinkable for most of the century then approaching its end. Now he ...

Were there strikes in the ancient world? The term, as Sarah Bond explains in this boundary-crossing new book, derives from a notorious act of resistance in April 1768 when British sailors lowered (or ...

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received. ‘The Big Hop’ by David Rooney review Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First ...

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley follows in the footsteps of those who fled fascism. Perhaps you’ve heard the stories ...

It was the greatest contest in the history of art – and arguably the most mysterious too. The year was 1401 and in Florence, the ‘home’ of the Renaissance, uncertainty reigned. Still reeling from an ...

On 8 October 1982 Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative Party Conference that ‘the National Health Service is safe with us’. This would prove to be among her most memorable lines. However, as ...