T he sums are eye-watering. In 991 the English king Æthelred paid the Vikings £10,000 to stop them sacking the east coast of England. Three years later a sum variously recorded as £16,000 or £22,000 ...

Why St Brice became so popular in Anglo-Saxon England is a mystery. A Gaulish cleric of the fourth century, he succeeded St Martin as Bishop of Tours and behaved so badly that he was driven out of his ...

Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes by William M. Schniedewind asks what authorship meant to the hidden ...

Robert Clive’s death has long been attributed to suicide. What is the evidence?

What does the history of the Channel Tunnel tell us about Britain’s relationship with its neighbours? A t 8.23am on the ...

Omar G. Encarnación is Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics at Bard College and author of Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) ...

In late 1945 and 1946 reporters from around the world were accommodated at a peculiar-looking castle in the Franconian town of Stein. It was an appropriate setting. The castle belonged to a dynasty of ...

When Abbot Abbo of Fleury agreed to travel to Gascony to advise on the reform of the monastery of La Réole, he would not have expected that his trip would result in his death. Yet in 1004 Abbo was the ...

In the 1860s a young architect arrives in a small town in southern England. He has been sent to renovate the town’s great church, a splendid medieval building which has fallen into disrepair. The roof ...

Tasked with stemming a growing wave of duels, Montevideo Police Chief Virgilio Sampognaro spared no effort in putting officers on the tail of men he identified as potential duellists or seconds in the ...

Thanks to Joseph Goebbels, the film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst luxuriated in a massive budget for the dramatised documentary he shot in occupied Prague during the autumn of 1942. Commissioned to ...

T oothbrushing has been a regular part of most people’s daily routines since the mid-20th century, but it was only a few ...