The vast deserts of the American West posed logistical problems for the US Army. Camels offered a novel solution.

Two recent books, The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein and Revolutions: A ...

How to read more? We might take instruction from a more leisurely age.

The emirate of Granada – Islam’s last polity in Spain – was surrendered to the Catholic monarchs on 2 January 1492.

The body belonged to Charles d’Espagne, constable of France and its most powerful figure after the king, Jean II. The man ...

A brilliant inventor and engineer, William George Armstrong was also an armaments magnate, a considerate and generous man who manufactured killing machinery in large quantitities. Born in 1810, the ...

Cold War Yugoslavia, Oswald of Northumbria, the wreck of the Spanish treasure ship San José, educating the Maharaja of Travancore, understanding the Aurora Borealis, and more. Plus: reviews, opinion, ...

Frederick II was ill for some months before his death. Early in December 1250 a fierce attack of dysentery confined him to his hunting lodge of Castel Fiorentino in the south of Italy, which was part ...

In 1563 Elizabeth Flynte, a servant from Haselor, Warwickshire, described the extra-marital activities of her mistress to the church court of the Lichfield diocese: He come in here this night, ...

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) is a profoundly – even unsettlingly – historical novel. Granted, it doesn’t look like one at first. Set either in Golding’s own day, or in the very near ...

‘Which moment would I most like to go back to? Just before the Big Bang. I realise there are risks attached.’ I opted for Latin America in the late 1960s when HMG, alarmed by the Cuban Revolution, ...

The 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 1968 prompted a moment of soul searching for many women frustrated at how little progress seemed to have been made towards equality. One of these was Joyce ...