Recent books, The Heretic of Cacheu by Toby Green and Worlds of Unfreedom by Roquinaldo Ferreira, painstakingly recreate the ...

As the medieval book trade declined, Oxford scribes had to turn their hands to other crafts to get by. A t its height ...

Other satellite technologies have also revolutionised daily life. Weather satellites have made forecasts more accurate, while ...

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French traces the line ...

Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster by Melanie Arndt discovers how civil society flourished – and then faltered – in the fallout.

El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness by Giles Tremlett considers the making of the mediocrity ...

O n 20 June 1940, with the threat of large-scale enemy bombing looming ever closer and the Battle of Britain imminent, a letter from the Ministry of Home Security was sent to sele ...

A literate slave was a must-have in wealthy ancient Roman households. Keen to capitalise on this taste for learning, masters and slaves alike turned education into profit.

Mikhail Bulgakov wasn’t all that bothered about the future, even on his deathbed. The last photos of him, taken in his Moscow apartment in February 1940, show no trace of fear. Although his face is ...

On 21 March 1776 the popular politician John Wilkes (1725-97) rose in a packed House of Commons to speak in favour of parliamentary reform. The franchise, he argued, was hopelessly out of date, with ...

Walter Sellar and Julian Yeatman met as students at Oriel College, Oxford. They matriculated on the same day in April 1919. But they had other things in common. They were both wounded veterans of the ...

Magnifying lenses date back to antiquity; Nero watched gladiators through ones made of emerald. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft in 1632, first encountered them as an apprentice in the cloth ...