How many planets are there? As with the discovery of Uranus, the answer depends on who you ask. Detail from Joseph Wright of ...

What makes someone a king? More importantly, what unmakes a king? Henry II’s experiment in co-kingship saw one Henry III fall ...

The concerns of daily life prompted early modern people to seek reassurance in fate, stars, and astrologers.

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della ...

In 1861 serfdom, the system which tied the Russian peasants irrevocably to their landlords, was abolished at the Tsar’s imperial command. Four years later, slavery in the USA was similarly declared ...

Long before Louis Braille’s time, attempts had been made to create embossed letters or shapes on wood or paper to enable the blind to read by touch. After the Napoleonic Wars, a French artillery ...

'The East is a university in which the scholar never takes his degree', George Curzon, Viceroy-designate of India, told an Old Etonian dinner in 1898. 'It is a temple where the suppliant adores but ...

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language by Edward Wilson-Lee finds in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a case for the Rennaissance as a triumph not of individuality, but of ...

For much of his life Archbishop William Laud kept a diary in which he recorded a myriad of intriguing facts, ranging from great matters of state to enigmatic details so painfully private that only he ...