On 6 October 1802 Ludwig van Beethoven confessed his despair at the loss of his hearing in the Heiligenstadt Testament.

Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four by Susan Pedersen wonders whether a radical relationship might offer inspiration for a ...

The Making of a Prehistoric Human by Peter Sahlins charts the ascent of an idea from prehistory to popular culture.

Wikipedia turns 25 this year. Its success was not a given and reveals much about our changing relationship with information online.

Coal merchant and concert promoter Thomas Britton passed away on 27 September 1714 after a prank went awry. T here was plenty of music in Restoration London, but for those in the know the best place ...

In 1355 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, by common consent the most important post-antique Roman lawyer, wrote a brief treatise ...

Philip Hensher’s A History of the Novel in Britain is certainly novel but how does it fare as history?

In 1938 a sensational spy trial exposed a Nazi plot to seduce and blackmail US officers. Despite America’s technological might, counterintelligence had been slow on the uptake.

Redressing the crimes of Pinochet’s regime has been a hard-fought and often contested process. Chile’s current presidency has revealed how easily progress can be reversed. José Antonio Kast is Chile’s ...

In The China Question: Eight Centuries of Fantasy and Fear Ho-fung Hung watches the West swing from Sinophilia to Sinophobia and back again. The China Question argues that the Mongols’ brutal westward ...

‘Who is the most overrated person in history? Henry VIII. Nasty piece of work and not as clever as he thought he was.’ It is my own tradition, but fundamentally I care about understanding why people ...