As so often in study of the past, continuing to ask the question matters more than agreeing upon an answer. Buildings made of ...

Why are you a historian of the Atlantic World? The Atlantic World is so vast and diverse; I’ll never run out of places and peoples to study. Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, as it ...

Disputing Disaster is a book about the First World War’s origins and causes, not – as its title suggests – the war itself. It discusses six historians who have written on a century-old debate that has ...

Richard, Duke of York was one of the barons who competed to run England during the reign of the hopelessly inadequate Henry VI. With a better claim to the crown by strict primogeniture than Henry ...

The composer of the Daphnis and Chloe ballet, the ever-popular Bolero, the Pavane for a Dead Infanta and a piano concerto for the left hand among many admired works was 62 when he died. From his ...

A brilliant inventor and engineer, William George Armstrong was also an armaments magnate, a considerate and generous man who manufactured killing machinery in large quantitities. Born in 1810, the ...

Port wine played the same role in Portugal that whisky did in Scotland, as a profitable export to England from a struggling economy. English merchants were already established in Lisbon and Oporto, ...

The first Christmas of the First World War has become something of a byword for truces in the trenches and the somewhat controversial subject of football. Yet Britain’s contribution to the war was not ...

The Renaissance came later to Prague than to Venice, Flanders, or Rome. But it was no less transformative when it did. In the 16th century Prague became a place where empires converged and cultures ...