History Today

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil and Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration bring Tudor and Stuart espionage in from the cold.

For more than a thousand years BC and AD have bisected our understanding of time. Should we keep them?

As the last living perpetrators are brought to justice, Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-first Century by Tobias Buck wonders what purpose the prosecution of Bruno Dey serves.

Interrail gave young Europeans the freedom of the continent in the 1970s. Five decades on, people are still taking the train.

Britain’s dearth of Afghan informants provided an opportunity for a disinherited Indian prince and his son to present themselves as an authentic conduit to the Muslim world. Soon they were advising the nation on subjects from geopolitics to the powers of the occult.

Was the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 inevitable?

The Literary and Philosophical Society was once ubiquitous, allowing minds to meet and views to collide. Their disappearance has left more questions than answers.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore gives a human face to magic in medieval and early modern England.

At the outset of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference Japan enjoyed a seat at the top table, but the vexed issue of racial equality set it and its notional Western allies on different paths.

The Paris Olympics of 1900 celebrated not just sporting excellence, but France’s might.