Ancient Greek reflections on imperial power have unsettling resonance in the geopolitics of Donald Trump.

Over the course of the following two days, various local men who spoke with the journalist obligingly pointed out other unmarried mothers who lived in their communities, some of whom had prodigious ...

Confronted by a confusing and complex national history, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk decided to embrace myth rather than debunk it. The Second World War disrupted narratives of mankind’s ‘progress’, ...

Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600 by A. Tunç Şen follows the fortunes ...

Five hundred years ago, in the early spring of 1526, browsers at the booksellers’ stalls clustered in the narrow lanes that ...

An army of help accompanied wealthy British sightseers on their 18th-century sojourns across the Continent. What was it like to travel as a servant on the Grand Tour?

St Patrick’s Day is a global celebration of Irish culture, but in the US its parades have always been political.

Y ou have to know the angel is there before you can see him. He is hidden around a corner, a carving set high up on an ...

T he Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, in 883, King Alfred sent an embassy to India: [That] year Sigehelm and Athelstan took to Rome – and also to India to [the shrines of] St ...

Now famin beginneinge to Looke gastely and pale in every face, thatt notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves ...

The same month another revolution began in the back room of a bar up the street. It was called the Cabaret Voltaire. The man behind it was Hugo Ball, a German poet. Ball needed money. He persuaded the ...

No premodern poet praised coffee with greater passion than the North African jurist-poet Abu al-Fath al-Tunisi (d.1576). As he wrote in one of his ‘coffee poems’: ‘The status of the precious coffee of ...