Historian Steven Gunn uncovers what thousands of fatal accidents can tell us about everyday existence in 16th-century England ...

Physicist Frank Close traces how British science – and fear of a Nazi bomb – lit the fuse for the nuclear age ...

Traversing the landscape of medieval Europe, they sang of longing, power and – whether implicitly or explicitly – sex. They moved from castle to court, debated morals and aphrodisiacs, and ...

Historian Bettany Hughes reveals what growing up in the ancient Roman Empire was really like – from knucklebones and wooden ...

This is how a royal Frankish dynasty turned flowing locks into a political weapon, and why cutting them could mean deadly ...

Behind the myth of the Minotaur lies the ancient Minoan civilisation – a culture steeped in ritual, rich in symbolism, and ...

During the Second World War, thousands of Allied pilots were deployed on a mission so dangerous, and so overshadowed by the rest of the conflict, that many referred to themselves grimly by the acronym ...

In 14th-century England, the prevailing experience wasn’t of medieval splendour, of chivalric knights, illuminated manuscripts and mighty monarchs. From the early 1300s to the century’s close, England ...

A Mesopotamian myth from nearly 4,000 years ago tells of a man who builds a boat to save the world from a divine flood, long before the Bible’s famous story ...

Who was Saladin? A Sunni Muslim of Kurdish descent, Saladin was the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty (which ruled over modern-day Egypt and parts of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Yemen) and was the first ...