On 1 October 1868, King Mongkut – who reigned as Rama IV – passed away having trod a delicate course to keep Thailand free of ...

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett picks through the fragments of ...

On 27 September 1130, a Norman usurper gained a crown from a desperate pope and the Kingdom of Sicily was born.

The prospect of a second Donald Trump victory in November’s US election has widely been seen – at least by liberal commentators –as an apocalyptic threat to democracy. Indeed, the coming election is ...

The seventh-century prince Mahendravarman Pallava and his cousin Vajrabodhi, the Indian tantric Buddhist answer to Merlin. Hindi, Urdu, French, Italian and a little Persian and Arabic. I am ashamed to ...

In listening to the war’s loudest voices, Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare by Gregory ...

Uzbekistan was a product of Islamic modernism and Soviet might. Free from the latter, the nation now seeks to foreground the ...

A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome: Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, ...

Eight years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, a choir of 11 African American singers, almost all of whom had been born into bondage, arrived in London. Hoping to raise money for a ...