Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World by Edith Hall sees the signs of environmental ...

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who ...

Bolesław Chrobry was finally crowned king of Poland on 18 April 1025. It was an elevation two decades in the making. Otto III ...

Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito. O n the ...

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud ...

The traditional date for the founding of the greatest city of the Western world was the product of guesswork by Roman writers of the late centuries BC, working backwards from their own time. There ...

Some seeds of modern science dropped into the ground when the flower of Graeco-Roman learning withered. A few survived even the ignorance and superstition of the worst period of the Dark Ages; but for ...

More than a million Indians fought for Britain in the First World War, 60,000 of whom were killed. In the immediate aftermath of the war, pressure for Indian independence mounted. Early in April 1919 ...

When he was elected doge in 1354, Marin Falier was a veteran of 76. Two of his family had held the office before him and he himself had done the Republic much service. He had been a member of the ...

Saint Ignatius of Loyola began his career as an ambitious army officer with, as he recalled, ‘a great and vain desire to win renown’. In time he would become a general, but of a religious order rather ...