Volume: 62 Issue: 1

Would a new Act in Restraint of Appeals such as Henry VIII enacted against Rome in 1533 achieve a similar objective for Eurosceptics today of ‘repatriating powers...

Frederick the Great, the man who made Prussia a leading European power, was born on January 24th, 1712.

Italian Fascist scouts meet a member of the Hitler Youth in Padua, October 1940: a picture explained by Roger Hudson.

The poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Coventry Patmore both subscribed to a Tory world view, fiercely opposing the reforms of Prime Minister Gladstone. But their...

Today Jane Austen is regarded as one of the greats of English literature. But it was not always so. Amanda Vickery describes the changing nature of Austen’s...

The Maid of Orléans was born on January 6th 1412: she has been an incarnation of French national identity and pride for six centuries.

A selection of readers' correspondence with the editor, Paul Lay.

Updating an 18th-century Satire on the National Debt

Paul Lay pays tribute to the Renaissance and Early Modern historian who was a pioneer of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Simon Heffer argues that until relatively recently most historians have been biased in their efforts to harness the past to contemporary concerns.

Ian Bradley looks at the life of Vincent Priessnitz, pioneer of hydrotherapy, whose water cures gained advocates throughout 19th-century Europe and beyond and are...

What can historical fiction tell us about the past that factual history can’t? Does it distort the record and confuse the reader? What exactly is historical...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a masterpiece of Middle English literature, which narrowly escaped destruction in the 18th century. Nicholas Mee examines the...

The triumph of liberal democracy was supposed to herald an end to history. But it has returned with a vengeance, says Tim Stanley.

David Torrance examines a pioneering article, first published in History Today in 1990, which argued that the Scottish Enlightenment was not restricted to...

The black activist Malcolm X was not a civil rights leader. Nor was he a victim of the mass media. He was its beneficiary, in life and death, argues Peter Ling....

Enter our crossword and win an audiobook of 1215: The Year of Magna Carta.

The Treaty of Versailles, negotiated by the fractious Allies in the wake of the First World War, did not crush Germany, nor did it bring her back into the family...

With the New Year release of Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse Gervase Phillips explores the true story of the horses...

The Zoological Society of London was launched in 1826 to promote scientific research into new species. Roger Rideout describes how it amassed its specimens for its...

A pair of new books offer differing takes on the stoicism of British explorers in search of geographical extremes.

Roger Moorhouse on a book that provides a powerful antidote to fashionable nostalgia for life in the GDR.

If people are what they eat, Winston Churchill was plain cooking, whisky, champagne and the best Havana cigar smoke; and all that these might be taken to imply....

The author of...

Wrap your brain around questions on the first English newspaper, the last king of Burma, the real Macbeth and more.

Juliet Gardiner reviews John Forster's biography of Charles Dickens.

A livey and accessible biography of Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state.

Rohan McWilliam reviews Matthew Sweet's 'different history of the Home Front': the Ritzkrieg and the opulent lifestyles that the rich enjoyed in London...

David Waller reviews a fascinating chronicle which 'traces the social history of a sport almost devoid of rules'.