Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600 by A. Tunç Şen follows the fortunes ...

Five hundred years ago, in the early spring of 1526, browsers at the booksellers’ stalls clustered in the narrow lanes that ...

An army of help accompanied wealthy British sightseers on their 18th-century sojourns across the Continent. What was it like to travel as a servant on the Grand Tour?

Y ou have to know the angel is there before you can see him. He is hidden around a corner, a carving set high up on an ...

St Patrick’s Day is a global celebration of Irish culture, but in the US its parades have always been political.

A quiet, shy man, the unfortunate John Byng was no coward – he faced his death with cool courage – but he seems to have been too cautious, passive and defeatist for command in the British navy. He ...

Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the interwar British Union of Fascists (BUF), remains perhaps the most notorious figure in modern British history, remembered for his failed attempts to introduce to ...

Just how many millions of deaths Joseph Stalin was responsible for is disputed, but that the figure runs into millions is not in doubt. To the end, when he was in his seventies and approaching his own ...

L ong before she died, the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner was horrified to realise that she was being written out of history ...

T he Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, in 883, King Alfred sent an embassy to India: [That] year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome – and also to India to [the shrines of] St ...

Now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves ...

During the reign of Sultan Mehmet IV (r. 1648-87), the Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn (imperial council) would meet every other morning in a domed chamber of the Topkapi Palace. When the Grand Vizier and his ...