Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English by Elisabeth van Houts is a sympathetic biography of the woman who would be king.

As ancient Rome was divided by civil war Cicero found himself torn. Caesar was his old adversary, but he was also powerful, and it was politically and personally expedient to support him.

Would St Augustine have considered the US attack on Iran a just war? The pope and the vice president are split on the matter.

The Life and Times of Britain’s First Female Cabinet Minister by Nan Sloane illuminates an overlooked trailblazer of the ...

In August 1936 Franklin D. Roosevelt gave a boldly pacifist campaign speech, promising no American would have to go to war.

Rider Haggard after hours spent digging on Bradenham Heath in Norfolk searching for the gibbet cage in which the body of the ...

The legacy of a decade of British weapons testing in its vast central deserts has forced Australia into an uncomfortable ...

It was the morning of 26 April 1478. Francesco de’ Pazzi and Bernardo Baroncelli, members of two of Florence’s oldest banking families, knocked at the Medici Palace. Lorenzo de’ Medici, whom many ...

After a long battle, Britain’s Sex Discrimination Act came into force in 1975. What did it do for women? The 50th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 1968 prompted a moment of soul searching for many ...

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels finds that the son of God is more than the sum of his parts. In the New Testament, Jesus is a charismatic miracle healer. He ...

Ever since 1873 when the German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, following the evidence of Homer’s Iliad, found the remnants of a grand metropolis – now Hisarlik in modern Turkey – ...

‘Piagnoni’, they were called: ‘weepers’. They were gangs of boys and young men – mostly middle class – who patrolled the streets of Florence in the 1490s, shouting abuse at the visibly impious: drunks ...