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 ...

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

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

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

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.

The year before Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, another writer, Olympe de Gouges, published a comparable call for equality during the turmoil of revolutionary France.

Roman politics after the Emperor Diocletian abdicated in AD 305 was confusingly complicated as emperors and deputy emperors of the West and of the East contended for power. Among them was Flavius ...

Created from the bodies of war-wounded soldiers for an unnamed emperor, the first modern cyborg, Soldier 241, appears in a one-act play, Blood and Iron, published in the Strand Magazine in October ...

In 1901, on the 300th anniversary of his death, the bodies of Tycho Brahe and his wife Kirstine were exhumed in Prague. They had been embalmed and were in remarkably good condition, but the astronomer ...

The town of Chartres, some 50 miles (80km) south-west of Paris, is dominated by one of France’s most beautiful cathedrals, famed among much else for its medieval stained glass. In the Middle Ages it ...

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