As the medieval book trade declined, Oxford scribes had to turn their hands to other crafts to get by. A t its height ...

Recent books, The Heretic of Cacheu by Toby Green and Worlds of Unfreedom by Roquinaldo Ferreira, painstakingly recreate the ...

Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster by Melanie Arndt discovers how civil society flourished – and then faltered – in the fallout.

Other satellite technologies have also revolutionised daily life. Weather satellites have made forecasts more accurate, while ...

El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness by Giles Tremlett considers the making of the mediocrity ...

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French traces the line ...

A literate slave was a must-have in wealthy ancient Roman households. Keen to capitalise on this taste for learning, masters and slaves alike turned education into profit.

Mikhail Bulgakov wasn’t all that bothered about the future, even on his deathbed. The last photos of him, taken in his Moscow apartment in February 1940, show no trace of fear. Although his face is ...

Around 1540 Martin Luther received a letter from a pastor in rural Saxony, asking for advice on how to deal with the corpse of a recently deceased woman who was steadily eating herself in the grave ...

When the burger landed on the tables of the first Wimpy Bar in 1954, it marked a new era of modernity, global connection, and convenience for a Britain rebuilding from the austerity of the Second ...

South of the Pyrenees lies the holidaymakers’ Utopia’, promised a 1958 Thomas Cook brochure: ‘a spectacular, flamboyant kingdom of the sun’. The kingdom was Spain, but the copywriter failed to mention ...

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David Rooney returns Alcock and Brown to aviation's top flight. The names ‘Alcock’ and ...