On 1 October 1868, King Mongkut – who reigned as Rama IV – passed away having trod a delicate course to keep Thailand free of ...

On 27 September 1130, a Norman usurper gained a crown from a desperate pope and the Kingdom of Sicily was born.

The acute housing crisis of mid-Victorian Britain generated stormy opinions about the nature of state intervention and the ...

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett picks through the fragments of ...

American democracy has been haunted by the spectre of a Caesar-type figure since the birth of the republic. Have such fears ...

In listening to the war’s loudest voices, Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare by Gregory ...

The seventh-century prince Mahendravarman Pallava and his cousin Vajrabodhi, the Indian tantric Buddhist answer to Merlin. Hindi, Urdu, French, Italian and a little Persian and Arabic. I am ashamed to ...

For millennia everybody knew that human beings enjoy a privileged, unique position at the centre of the universe. That self-confidence began to crack after Nicolaus Copernicus suggested that the Earth ...

The Nationalists had run out of steam and Communist armies took Nanjing in April and Shanghai in May. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference was summoned to Beijing, where Mao opened ...