In 1912 Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin), a 12-year-old schoolgirl, decided to carry out her own heavenly research. She ...

Solomon Shereshevsky died on 1 May 1958 . He dreamt of being a hero but achieved greatness of another kind.

We need to ask how much deference there actually was’ Linda Colley is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. I have my own tale of deference. My ...

The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby surfaces Umayyad and ...

A Nottinghamshire election in 1593 descended into farce, violence and, ultimately, futility.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was established in 1909 to exploit the Persian Gulf oil field, which had been discovered the year before. The name was later changed to Anglo-Iranian. By 1950 the company ...

In July 2023 the Orkney Islands, lying just off the northeast coast of Scotland, made headlines around the world after the local council voted to explore ‘alternative forms of governance’. One option ...

The death of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili in a German concentration camp 80 years ago was kept a secret for decades. In 1935 Stalin declared ‘life has become better’. This was clearly not ...

Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War between Science and Religion by Michael Taylor revels in the tangles of Victorian thought. Where does new life come from? According to one theory ...