Feature

Henri Pirenne transformed the way historians think about the end of the Classical world and the beginning of the Middle Ages.

The myths that surround the ultimately tragic rule of Charles I mask the realities of a courageous and uxorious king who fell foul of a bitter struggle between two sides of English Protestantism.

During the Second World War, Britain and the Soviet Union worked together in oil-rich Iran. Cooperation was to degenerate into suspicion at the dawn of the Cold War. 

In the fashionable female circles of 18th-century Paris, a physician who recommended fresh air, exercise and looser corsets became a celebrated figure.

Pirates captured by an increasingly powerful British state were routinely executed. But what happened to the families they left behind?

The chance survival of a ‘postbag’ of letters reveals a lost world of merchants, pilgrims, bankers and scholars.

‘Word blindness’ was a recognised condition more than a century ago. But it was not until the 1970s that it began to be accepted by the medical establishment.

Gerald Brooke’s time in a Soviet prison was a pivotal moment in Cold War espionage.

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was at the heart of daring interwar Paris, where she used her influence to defend those left behind by ‘progress’.

The grand funeral of Anne of Cleves, the neglected fourth queen of Henry VIII, took place during the reign of Mary Tudor, when English Catholicism was resurgent.