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

When his father, Rama II, died in 1824 the Siamese throne went to Mongkut’s older half-brother, who ruled as Rama III. Mongkut, aged 19, joined a monastery. Three months was customary. Mongkut stayed ...

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

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

The prospect of a second Donald Trump victory in November’s US election has widely been seen – at least by liberal commentators –as an apocalyptic threat to democracy. Indeed, the coming election is ...

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 ...

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

Uzbekistan was a product of Islamic modernism and Soviet might. Free from the latter, the nation now seeks to foreground the ...

A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome: Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, ...