Caught between the antagonistic states of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is stuck in geopolitical limbo. Its location – and its ...

Prague, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, became the centre of the Renaissance world, where cultures mixed and learning ...

The rules for young officers at West Point Military Academy in New York were strict. Alcohol possession could lead to expulsion and even smoking tobacco could affect one’s chances of graduating. Of ...

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle ...

A new book for the new year is an old British custom, but an old book can be even better.

Silent Night, or Stille Nacht in its original German, is one of the best known songs in the world, but few know anything of its authors. Its lyrics were written in 1816 by a somewhat loose-living ...

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin, who called him ‘my Himmler’. Involved in revolutionary activities from his teens and head of the secret police in Georgia in his twenties, he ...

The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 forced the Japanese government into unconditional surrender and the country, which was in a state of collapse, was occupied by ...

On 10 December 1948, after months of negotiation led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ...

One of my favourite places in the world is the Living Hall of the Frick Collection in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Either side of its fireplace, crowned by a St Jerome of El Greco, hang two portraits ...

So when Raúl Castro called for an end to the embargo based on economic and humanitarian grounds in late December, he was ...

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England found out about procreation the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.