An early modern ship’s surgeon had to treat not just broken bones but distress and trauma. I n September 1649 ship’s surgeon John Conny was deeply relieved and praised God that ‘all our men [are] in ...

Court-martialled in absentia on 2 August 1940, the Vichy regime confiscated de Gaulle’s property and condemned him to death.

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz, collects the works of Cuba's ...

‘What’s past is prologue’ Shakespeare wrote – but so little is known of his own. There are plenty of theories, each as implausible as the next.

British military engagement in northwest Europe did not pause after Waterloo and resume in 1914. The intervening century saw ...

Hinduism predates colonialism by thousands of years, but in Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu ...

I ronically, when we speak about inquisitions, people have come to expect the Spanish Inquisition. But inquisitions into the ...

On 25 July 1908 chemistry professor Kikunae Ikeda gave name to an elusive new taste: umami.

As a young man, the not-yet-famous philosopher René Descartes lived for a while in a very famous place: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 20 km outside Paris, where French kings had been building magnificent ...

In March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) – sat down with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on her roundtable discussion programme Prospects of ...

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received.

How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy alliance between oil, autocracy, and Wahhabism.