What the war released above all was a spirit of ephemerality’ Mark Polizzotti is Head of Publications at the Metropolitan ...

A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome: Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, ...

In June 1947 Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane over Mount Rainier in Washington when nine bright objects began tracking him at high speed. People have always seen signs and wonders in the skies, ...

American democracy has been haunted by the spectre of a Caesar-type figure since the birth of the republic. Have such fears ever been justified?

On 27 October 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic came into being as part of the Soviet Union, four years after a group of Muslim modernisers had formed an unholy alliance with a cohort of ...

When his father, Rama II, died in 1824 the Siamese throne went to Mongkut’s older half-brother, who ruled as Rama III. Mongkut, aged 19, joined a monastery. Three months was customary. Mongkut stayed ...

On 9 October 1771 masterpieces of Dutch art destined for Catherine the Great sank with the Vrouw Maria off the coast of ...

The acute housing crisis of mid-Victorian Britain generated stormy opinions about the nature of state intervention and the ...

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett picks through the fragments of George Villiers, James VI & I’s favourite mistake. Reading The Scapegoat ...

On 27 September 1130, a Norman usurper gained a crown from a desperate pope and the Kingdom of Sicily was born.