Pope Paul III did not mince his words. In the bull of excommunication promulgated on 17 December 1538, he reviled Henry VIII as a tyrant who had ‘transformed himself into a beast’. This was a king, ...

On Monday 7 November 1825 more than 100 gentlemen assembled at Nash’s Inn in Parramatta in the colony of New South Wales to bid farewell to their departing governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, at a ...

Against my better judgement, I was persuaded to try King and Conqueror (BBC One). The period covered – the run-up to the Norman Conquest – is much better documented in contemporary narrative sources ...

On the cold morning of 14 December 1825 a group of Russian army officers led 3,000 soldiers to Senate Square in central St Petersburg in an attempt to force the tsar’s senate to read their manifesto ...

In early modern England the time and date was often an informal matter, which had the potential to pose problems. I n 1563 ...

John Womack’s Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. Just before the Big Bang. I realise there are risks attached. In 1968 Jack Gallagher breezily suggested I work on Latin America. The rest is history.

One of these was Joyce Butler, the backbench Labour and Co-operative MP for Wood Green. Having had a longstanding interest in ...

A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda by Derek R. Peterson looks for the ordinary people who kept the regime’s wheels ...

On 7 December 1941 Japan launched a surprise attack on the naval base of Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, triggering war ...

Finished by the First World War and buried under the nation states that succeeded it, the Habsburg monarchy had survived for ...

As the father of descriptive geography, Strabo of Amasia provides a unique view of the early Roman Empire.

F or me, the standout book of 2025 is John Blair’s Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World ...