One of the most famous questions in the vast literature of the Fathers of the Early Christian Church is Tertullian’s ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ The fusion of Greek...

Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools is something of a capstone on a long scholarly career devoted to the history of education, running from his English Schools in the Middle Ages (1973) to

At a seance in Hampstead in June 1914, W.B. Yeats was contacted by a spirit guide, who announced that he was Leo Africanus and professed to be affronted that the poet hadn’t heard of him....

In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13....

In the 1790s revolutionaries on both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the...

There is an enduring myth that in 1948, when it achieved independence from Britain, Burma was a rich country with every reason to expect a bright future and that the policies and practices of the...

The exhibition at the British Library telling the life of London in maps is a grey affair.* So it should be, for the walls and cases are necessarily packed with old engraved plans and views, and...

In November 1913, ‘the Headingly two’, a dark-haired woman of about twenty-five and ‘a girlish figure in green cap and sports jacket’, stood trial for attempting to set...

Within a generation of Virgil’s death in 19 BC the trajectory of his poetic career had become iconic, with its apparently teleological progression from the slim one-volume collection of ten...

Very few schoolboys know that of the four Gospels only two offer any account of the conception and birth of Jesus, and even those schoolboys probably care little that Matthew and Luke, the two...

Until the past two decades most historians tended to be dismissive of Jacobitism as a subject of little more than antiquarian interest. In particular, they questioned both the scale of the threat...

As the long skein of historians’ interest continues to unwind – from its once dominant focus on politics and warfare, to the successively ‘new’ fields of intellectual,...

Remembrance Sunday this year was a good one for the Shot at Dawn campaigners. Since 1990 they have sought pardons for more than three hundred servicemen executed during World War One for...

Historical progress is back, even if it was only in some genres of academic history that it ever went away. It’s been some time, certainly, since historians of art saw painting as a...

Napoleon Bonaparte and his chief diplomat, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, are usually seen as the oddest of history’s odd couples. One personified boldness, ambition and overblown operatic...

Too much history can be bad for you. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – that was Marx’s famous comment on...

Contemporary history is useless unless it allows emotion to be recollected in tranquillity. Probably no episode in 20th-century history generated a more intense burst of feeling in the Western...

America’s struggle with the Soviet Union and Communism during the Cold War is the key founding myth of the modern American state – a state in many ways utterly different from the one...