Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, as it pushed me to study the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the bottom up.

A brilliant inventor and engineer, William George Armstrong was also an armaments magnate, a considerate and generous man who manufactured killing machinery in large quantitities. Born in 1810, the ...

The composer of the Daphnis and Chloe ballet, the ever-popular Bolero, the Pavane for a Dead Infanta and a piano concerto for the left hand among many admired works was 62 when he died. From his ...

Port wine played the same role in Portugal that whisky did in Scotland, as a profitable export to England from a struggling economy. English merchants were already established in Lisbon and Oporto, ...