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.

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

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

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

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 ...

They have long had a notorious reputation as the raiders and pirates of the medieval world and certainly it is not unjustified: their raids were fearsome and long-running. However, they were also ...

‘One could lose one’s faith from that picture.’ Those were the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his wife Anna on seeing this painting of a ‘startlingly dead’ Christ in the Swiss city of Basel in 1867.

St Francis of Assisi died on 4 October 1226, leaving behind the question of how we venerate a saint who resisted veneration. St. Francis of Assisi showing his stigmata in an illustrated manuscript, c.

In the popular imagination, early medieval England was a wild place populated by packs of ravenous wolves, devouring people and livestock. The image is at odds with modern research into wolf biology ...

Hitler had previously started rearming Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938. He was now determined to seize the Sudetenland, ...