How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

In the early 20th century the prison population in England and Wales was in sharp decline, despite a rise in crime. The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert ...

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

Italy’s entry into the Great War in 1915 prompted 300,000 men to return to their homeland to join the fight. Were they ...

How did Western Europe learn of the fall of Constantinople, the loss of Negroponte, and the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto? In the ...

The Earth was created in seven days. On which day were the dinosaurs made? Discoveries in geology and palaeontology forced Victorian creationists to be especially creative. When Samuel Pepys’ diary ...

Early in June 1098 the army of the First Crusade, heading south through Syria on its way to wrest Jerusalem from the Saracens, captured the city of Antioch, but was promptly shut in the city and ...

For all the pages printed about recent politics and politicians in Westminster, this is the first book about the building itself to be published in over twenty years. Illustrated with newly ...

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley follows in the footsteps of those who fled fascism. Perhaps you’ve heard the stories ...

In the summer of 1992 a senior British army officer was given the chance to visit Russia and Kyrgyzstan. His trip would have been unthinkable for most of the century then approaching its end. Now he ...