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

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The idea that a battle might alter the course of history, though first popularised in the 19th century, is not without foundation. For as one writer remarked a generation after 1066, ‘French customs ...

Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots by Roger Kreuz finds that copyright isn’t always a ...

The Cancelled Prime Minister: The Extraordinary Rise and Tragic Fall of Ramsay MacDonald by Walter Reid finds the romance behind Labour’s great betrayer.

No premodern poet praised coffee with greater passion than the North African jurist-poet Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi (d.1576). As he wrote in one of his ‘coffee poems’: ‘The status of the precious coffee of ...

The same month another revolution began in the back room of a bar up the street. It was called the Cabaret Voltaire. The man behind it was Hugo Ball, a German poet. Ball needed money. He persuaded the ...

In the early 1800s harsh desert landscapes in North America’s West, including the Sonoran, Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Great Basin deserts, were considered a major obstacle by early advocates of US ...