Disputing Disaster is a book about the First World War’s origins and causes, not – as its title suggests – the war itself. It discusses six historians who have written on a century-old debate that has ...

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

Caught between the antagonistic states of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is stuck in geopolitical limbo. Its location – and its ...

Chevaliere d’Eon or Chevalier d’Eon? An 18th-century legal dispute between two French spies unravelled into a public battle ...

For much of the 20th century, young working-class women in England found out about procreation the ‘hard way’ or the ‘dirty way’.

Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch reminds us that when it comes to sexuality and gender, scripture is often contradictory. The Bible was always too ...

It is, and of long time hath been, my well-beloved sister, a custom in the beginning of the New Year, for friends to send between presents or gifts, as the witnesses of their love and friendship, and ...

On Monday 25 May 1840, on a remote island 870 miles east of the Australian colony of New South Wales, 1,800 convicts celebrated the birthday of Queen Victoria. The party had been organised by the ...