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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.

For nine days Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess was the greatest box office phenomenon of the English Renaissance. Then a warrant was issued for his arrest.

‘The most important lesson history has taught me? Destroy your drafts and personal papers, because one day a graduate student will comb through them looking for incriminating titbits.’

A community of Ethiopian monk-scholars in Renaissance Rome brought their learning, language and liturgy into the heart of the Roman Church.

On 10 July 1873, decadent duo Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic frenzy ended with a gunshot.

In Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution, Anne Higonnet brings three dedicated followers of fashion to the fore.

Was Sir Thomas More born on Milk Street – and does it matter?

Does a state need a book of rules by which to operate? And who are those rules for, anyway?

For those learned in medieval medicine and astronomy, the dog days of July heralded dangerous times.