As so often in study of the past, continuing to ask the question matters more than agreeing upon an answer. Buildings made of ...

Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, as it pushed me to study the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the bottom up.

Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War by Perry Anderson relitigates the causes of the conflict through some of their key proponents.

A 19th-century tale of sex, royalty and corruption which inspired scores of satirists and even the makers of curiosity mugs. Martin Luther used pictorial propaganda to further the Protestant cause.

John Gillingham challenges an idea, recently presented in History Today, that the Anglo-Saxon King Egbert was responsible for the naming of England. A damned inheritance, hopelessly over-extended and ...

In 1941, down a narrow street in Rochdale was a small dark shop, visited by women with a very specific and urgent requirement. The proprietor was a ‘deep-bosomed’ lady in her sixties, overly made up ...

Suffragette sets out to tell the story of the ‘footsoldiers’ of the women’s suffrage movement. Director Sarah Gavon and writer Abi Morgan have therefore made the refreshing decision to avoid a more ...

Renaissance Italy was dominated by rich and powerful families whose reputations have been shaped by the many dark and dastardly deeds they committed. In quattrocento Florence, the Medici bought, ...

Far from being ‘unready’ (an unfortunate byname, meaning ‘poorly counselled’), Æthelred was a more capable king than his reputation would have us believe, a theme taken up in the May issue of History ...