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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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

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 ...

In outline the disastrous events of Charles I’s reign are well known to students of the seventeenth century. The king’s inability to work with Parliament led, four years after his accession, to a ...

As convicts celebrated Queen Victoria’s birthday on remote Norfolk Island, debates raged over the purpose of punishment and ...