Europe

Little remains of the great North African empire that was Rome's most formidable enemy, because, as Richard Miles explains, only its complete annihilation could satisfy its younger rival.

At the beginning of the ninth century, Charlemagne—already the master of Western Europe—was crowned by a calculating Pope as the supreme sovereign of the Christian world. Peter Munz asks what the real significance of his new title really was?

At the height of the Roman Empire, hundreds of merchant ships left Egypt every year to voyage through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, exchanging the produce of the Mediterranean for exotic eastern commodities. Raoul McLaughlin traces their pioneering journeys. 

James Hamilton looks at how volcanic activity in Iceland in 1783 and elsewhere elicited strange reactions, and stimulated the creative powers of artists and scientists.

In the 15th century, Cyriacus of Ancona journeyed in search of the Mediterranean’s Classical past. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for the 18th-century Grand Tour and today’s cultural holidays, as Marina Belozerskaya explains.

Nancy Mitford finds that Carlyle’s biography of the King was one of the oddest ever written, but it is ‘so carefully drawn that it finally presents a perfect likeness’.

Richard Cavendish remembers the events of October 9th, 1934.

Richard Cavendish remembers January 13th 1935.

Medieval scholars were the first to make the connection between maths and science and anticipated the discovery of inertia long before Newton. So why have their discoveries been forgotten, asks James Hannam.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, France was riven by political division as extremes of left and right vied for power. Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle tell the tragic and mysterious story of Laetitia Toureaux, a young woman swept up in the violent passions of the time.