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

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

We have a tendency to associate youth culture with modernity, but medieval people were as anxious about youths as are today’s headline writers worrying about the rise of the ‘millennial’. As the poet ...

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 ...

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in the Revolution of 1917, the country was still engaged in the First World War, allied with England, France and the United States against the Central Powers ...

The man who made ‘Pavlov’s dogs’ famous the world over won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1904. In his laboratory experiments with dogs he discovered what is generally called the conditioned reflex ...

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 ...

Emperor Constantine the Great authorised Christianity across the Roman Empire in 313, but it was Theodosius I, half a century later, who put the brute force of the imperial state behind the faith.