How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

Italy’s entry into the Great War in 1915 prompted 300,000 men to return to their homeland to join the fight. Were they ...

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

Newspaper seller, London, 1900. George Grantham Bain Collection. ‘By the 1990s many titles were “local in name only”’ Rachel Matthews, Associate Director of the Institute for Creative Cultures at ...

In December 1871 the Prince of Wales lay dangerously ill with typhoid, the disease that had killed his father. Taking advantage of modern technology, the Archbishop of Canterbury despatched telegraph ...

How did Western Europe learn of the fall of Constantinople, the loss of Negroponte, and the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto? In the ...

In the winter of 1471, the municipal council of Nördlingen in southern Germany got word of a scandal in the town’s public brothel. It prompted a criminal investigation into the conduct of the ...

In 1968, Fatah, the Palestinian political party, published its first series of protest posters. Clenched fists, raised arms, ammunition belts, bayonets, rifles – these posters were statements of ...

‘D id you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, sir?’ The question came from a 14-year-old boy on a school tour of the Minoan Room at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1936. The man being addressed was ...

In Vitaly Mansky’s wistful 2020 documentary Gorbachev. Heaven, which depicts the last months of the former Soviet leader’s life, Vladimir Putin plays the role of a ghost. While Gorbachev responds to ...