Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His latest book is ...

T he sky in the northern hemisphere had been darkened, the winters unusually harsh, and the summers barely arriving for decades when the German Lutheran author Johann Arndt published his Four Books on ...

The vagaries of palace politics are notoriously difficult to record. Historians should pay attention to rumour.

The 20th century’s most famous apostle of non-violence himself met a violent end. Mohandas Mahatma (‘the great soul’) Gandhi, who had taken a leading role in spearheading the campaign for independence ...

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe by John J. Callanan revels in the making of ...

It is, however, actually a sampler from Barbados – the earliest known Barbadian sampler in any collection. The RSN sampler is ...

In 1981, a horrific murder case required police in East Germany to go door-to-door collecting handwriting samples. There was ...

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 ...

British soldiers fighting in the American Revolutionary War were unprepared for the terrain awaiting them across the Atlantic ...

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 ...

A study of the hostile legends, immortalized in Shakespeare’s tragic drama, that have gathered around the real historical figure of Macbeth. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, king of scots, was a real person; ...

The royal pair were not well matched. Edward was tall and handsome, but his father was a hard act to follow and he was criticised for being cowardly, light-minded, extravagant, too much given to ...