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 ...

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

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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity by Frank Dikötter is a balanced account of the violent years between Kuomintang and communist rule. Across his works, Dikötter has ...

The 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 Thomas and St ...

Environmental history is a comparatively young field of enquiry with strong American roots. Roderick Nash, emeritus historian at the University of California, is usually credited with inventing the ...

Mikhail Bulgakov wasn’t all that bothered about the future, even on his deathbed. The last photos of him, taken in his Moscow apartment in February 1940, show no trace of fear. Although his face is ...