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 ...

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

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England found out about procreation the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.

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

As convicts celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday on remote Norfolk Island, debates raged over the purpose of punishment and ...

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that when it comes to sexuality and gender, scripture is often contradictory.

Absinthe, once the ‘Green Fairy’ – muse of painters and poets – came to haunt the last decades of 19th-century France. ‘Of all the alcoholic poisons that lead to crime, there is none more formidable ...

Why are you a historian of modern war? My interest in war goes back to the stories my grandparents told me of life in London and Coventry during the Second World War. It would be fascinating to see ...

In the racially segregated American South of the 1950s a Black woman sits in the section of a bus reserved for white passengers. Physically and verbally abused by the driver, she is forced off the ...

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 ...