Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito. O n the ...

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who ...

Bolesław Chrobry was finally crowned king of Poland on 18 April 1025. It was an elevation two decades in the making. Otto III ...

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud ...

Catherine of Siena (1347-80) was made a saint in 1461, less than a century after she died. In 1970 Pope Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, a rare title given only to saints who have made ...

More than a million Indians fought for Britain in the First World War, 60,000 of whom were killed. In the immediate aftermath of the war, pressure for Indian independence mounted. Early in April 1919 ...

Edward Wightman was well-known in Puritan circles in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire in the early 1600s, where he began proclaiming increasingly heretical opinions. He reportedly did not believe that ...

The death-knell of the Chartist movement in Britain sounded on what was meant to be its day of triumph. In a year when thrones tottered and regimes quailed as revolutions broke out all over Europe, ...

James II is generally considered to have been one of the worst of English kings. Recently, two American historians have incidentally had something to say in his defence. But in earlier times, ...

The television series 1864, directed by Ole Bornedal and based on books by historian Tom Buk-Swienty, has followed The Killing and Borgen in becoming a successful Danish export. But 1864 is neither ...