Feature

Bashar al-Assad is a child of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. These events underpin Syria’s authoritarian regime and its horrific actions.

Shipwrecked in 1609, Spanish administrator Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco became a guest of the shogun and wrote a detailed account of his 10 months in Japan.

The earliest European explorers to encounter ruins of the Maya civilisation could not believe it owed its creation to Indigenous Americans. How did they come to believe otherwise?

The Russians were among the first Europeans to sense California's potential. Had they not sold their settlement there in 1841, the world could have been a different place.

Whilst many Anglo-Saxons suffered under the Norman yoke, the Conquest came with the promise of freedom for England’s slaves.

The German First World War commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck has been described as the 20th century’s greatest guerrilla leader for his undefeated campaign in East Africa. Is the legend justified? 

For all its faults C.E Hamshere’s account of Francis Drake’s 16th-century circumnavigation, published in History Today in 1967, applies a historical imagination lacking in more recent studies, argues Hugh Bicheno.

How Victorian gentlemen’s clubs in London’s West End played a role in oiling the nation’s political wheels.

Charles I had ‘the authority to plan and initiate a policy, but he had not the power to enforce it.’