L ong before she died, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was horrified to realise that she was being written out of history ...

T he Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, in 883, King Alfred sent an embassy to India: [That] year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome – and also to India to [the shrines of] St ...

St Patrick’s Day is a global celebration of Irish culture, but in the US its parades have always been political.

Now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves ...

Mexico’s disgraced saviour General Antonio López de Santa Anna completed his comeback on 9 March 1839 as the Pastry War came to a close.

In school we learn there are 360 degrees in a circle, but where did the 360 come from? When it is pointed out that the Babylonians counted to base-60, rather than base-10 as we do, people often ask if ...

Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the interwar British Union of Fascists (BUF), remains perhaps the most notorious figure in modern British history, remembered for his failed attempts to introduce to ...

Just how many millions of deaths Joseph Stalin was responsible for is disputed, but that the figure runs into millions is not in doubt. To the end, when he was in his seventies and approaching his own ...

You have to know the angel is there before you can see him. He is hidden around a corner, a carving set high up on an outside wall, in a quiet rural churchyard in Gloucestershire. His stone eyes are ...

There is a story that suggests Joseph Stalin hated Hamlet. Shakespeare’s story of bloody intrigue in the court of Denmark supposedly reminded Stalin of Kremlin politics – and could not criticism of ...

Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation (Profile, 2017). People still argue about the fall of the Roman ...

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 ...