A new academic study reveals how Cold War paranoia, space medicine, and germ theory collided in one of the most bizarre ...

In early modern Britain, neighbourly gossip was the backbone of a court system that turned moments of privacy into public ...

Pazuzu was one of many ancient Mesopotamian supernatural beings that blurred the line between god and monster. Historian Dr ...

Emily Hobhouse revealed the truth about Britain’s brutal treatment of Boer civilians during the South African War. She was ...

The Fountain of Youth is most associated with the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León, but people have believed in ...

Joan Smith describes how the powerful women of ancient Rome’s first imperial dynasty were smeared as adulterers, poisoners ...

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Built in 1923, the Flying Scotsman was the first locomotive to be officially clocked as travelling at 100mph. Later, the story of Scotsman’s preservation against the odds captured the imagination of ...

John of Gaunt. “What name on the roll of English princes is more familiar?” wrote Sydney Armitage-Smith, Gaunt’s first biographer, in 1904. John of Gaunt is still as familiar in our collective ...

Cosimo de' Medici (later known as Cosimo the Elder) was, according to Pope Pius II, “king in all but name” of Florence. This was not entirely a compliment: like Pius's home city of Siena (a Tuscan ...

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems odd that anyone in Britain would have wanted to make friends with Adolf Hitler, the most recognisable face of evil in the 20th century. But in the 1930s, many ...

The Roman empire was by no means the largest in history: in fact 25 others have occupied a larger land mass either before or since. Yet very few can boast as wide-reaching an influence and impact. At ...