Greece

Meant to live a life of perfect peacefulness and contemplation, in reality monks were human and fallible. How violent could life in the medieval cloister be?

Was the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 inevitable?

In a BBC interview on 1 July 1952, self-taught linguist Michael Ventris announced that he had deciphered the Linear B script of Minoan Crete.

Two very different volumes, Sparta and the Commemoration of War and The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae, grapple with the myth of Sparta.

Did the Greeks really trick their way into Troy inside a gigantic wooden horse?

Four historians evaluate perceptions of Rome’s eastern successor beyond the piety, icons, bureaucracy and gold of Byzantium.

Early Christianity brought new opportunities for Roman and Byzantine women – it also brought new reasons to vilify them.

In ancient Greece the ‘least dangerous’ branch of government – the courts – wielded serious political power.

Well-researched and attractively written, Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy by Robin Waterfield grapples with a life that left few records.

Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox is a masterly survey of the Iliad, its majesty, its pathos and its unparalleled progression from wrath to pity.