T he thing I’d like most in the world’, says the reader in Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), ‘is to make clocks run backwards.’ And underst ...

Cecil’s clause did not detail any line of succession, but was instead an interregnum clause. Highly detailed, it outlined a ...

A fter months of diplomatic wrangling, national security reviews, and political infighting, on 20 January 2026 the UK ...

Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy by Carol Chillington Rutter is a case study of the archetypal early modern ...

One of the first victims of the Siege of Leningrad was Betty. She had arrived in the city in 1911 and quickly established herself as an important part of her community. On 8 September 1941 – just a ...

More than a million Indians fought for Britain in the First World War, 60,000 of whom were killed. In the immediate aftermath of the war, pressure for Indian independence mounted. Early in April 1919 ...

Edward Wightman was well-known in Puritan circles in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire in the early 1600s, where he began proclaiming increasingly heretical opinions. He reportedly did not believe that ...

As China’s economy continues a tailspin that is increasingly obvious to outsiders, the rest of the world asks: what will happen? Will the government ‘reform’ the economy and make people happy again?

The first Europeans known to have climbed Table Mountain were Portuguese seamen under Antonio de Saldanha, whose ships were part of a fleet on its way to India in 1503. They had a fracas with the ...

Faisal Devji takes the last approach, focusing on what he sees as a global transformation in the way the term Islam was used ...

E dith-Matilda or Matilda II of England is best remembered as ‘Good Queen Maud’, the wife of Henry I and patron of the 12th ...

Why are you a historian of the pre-modern Balkans and Turkey? I was born in Bulgaria, but as an undergraduate in the UK I ...