On 13 February 1692 the Macdonalds of Glencoe were put to the sword by troops loyal to William III. Nobody was held to ...

N o premodern poet praised coffee with greater passion than the North African jurist-poet Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi (d.1576). As ...

Rather than a catalogue of a fanciful past, Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present by Owen Davies and Ceri ...

a Curiosity to taste the Juice, or Matter contain’d in one of the little Cystis’s or Glands of the same, which he did by ...

A Concise History breaks off these later accretions and unearths their long history. Runes’ primary function as an alphabetic writing system is underlined throughout, as part of the ‘uphill battle’ ...

Unreason reigned supreme in Zurich on 5 February 1916 as Dada made its debut at the Cabaret Voltaire. B y February 1916 Lenin was staying in a shabby quarter of Zurich. He lived next to a butcher’s on ...

There is a story that suggests Joseph Stalin hated Hamlet. Shakespeare’s story of bloody intrigue in the court of Denmark supposedly reminded Stalin of Kremlin politics – and could not criticism of ...

Charles Sherwood Stratton seemed a perfectly normal baby when he was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1838, but from the age of six or seven months he stopped growing. He added a few inches later on ...

Under their inspiring Scottish manager Matt Busby after the War, Manchester United became one of the most brilliant and exciting football teams in England. They won the FA Cup in 1948 and in 1957 the ...

Viking raids on the British Isles began late in the eighth century. After their fill of rape and pillage the raiders would sail away again loaded with their ill-gotten loot. In some cases, however, ...

British servicemen overseas bought sex, sometimes in brothels run by the British army. In the 1970s they began to talk about it. Finished by the First World War and buried under the nation states that ...

In September 1949 the American, British and Canadian governments announced that an atomic explosion had recently occurred in the Soviet Union. The Soviet news agency Tass responded, laughably blaming ...