The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain: 1815-1945 by N.A.M. Rodger looks above decks for the story of the modern ...

The rapid surrender of Japan in 1945 certainly suggested that the United States possessed the most decisive of weapons. Indeed there is reason to suspect that the real purpose in using them was less ...

In Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco, Tim Blanning restores the ‘incorrigible Saxon’ to ...

For some UK prime ministers, their fate travels no further than your local pub quiz: who was the only prime minister to have been assassinated? Spencer Perceval. 1812 for a bonus point. A rare few are ...

Samplers, pieces of embroidery made to practise or demonstrate needlework stitches, were an important part of girls’ education for centuries. In Britain, girls stitched samplers from the 17th to the ...

The sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

A small Portuguese fleet of three vessels captained by Vasco da Gama arrived in Kerala in May 1498 having sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. The voyage consolidated a process of Portuguese expansion ...

Born in 1654 to the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Elizabeth Cavendish was the eldest of six children. Granddaughter to both Civil War general William Cavendish and prominent MP William ...

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of the controversial satirist and philosopher. Imagine a beehive. The ...

Except for aliens, there are more conspiracy theories about history than anything else. There are people who believe that Shakespeare’s plays were really by the Earl of Oxford, that JFK was ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was no public outrage, because they were not told about the crime.

London, Hereford and Oxford have all laid claim to Pepys’ ‘pretty witty Nell’ – he also called her ‘a bold merry slut’ -- but she was probably a native Londoner, born close to the scene of her future ...