The remarkable fall of absinthe: from 19th-century ‘Green Fairy’ to scourge of society.

The Chinese folk tale The Snail-Shell Girl tells the story of a poor man who falls in love with a beautiful woman who lives in a shell, their path to happiness thwarted by an evil landlord. Adapted ...

Why are you a historian of modern war? My interest in war goes back to the stories my grandparents told me of life in London and Coventry during the Second World War. It would be fascinating to see ...

In the racially segregated American South of the 1950s a Black woman sits in the section of a bus reserved for white passengers. Physically and verbally abused by the driver, she is forced off the ...

On 10 December 1948, after months of negotiation led by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed by the UN General Assembly. At first, after Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband ...

The earliest representation of the turkey in Europe is ‘a turkey-cock in his pride proper’, requested by the Yorkshireman William Strickland when he applied for his family’s coat of arms in 1550. Can ...

The last time anyone saw Arthur Cravan alive, he was sailing off, alone, into the Pacific Ocean on a leaky boat. The nephew of Oscar Wilde, he was a poet, a boxer, a fraudster, a draft-dodger – and, ...

Nile Green is Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA and author of Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (W.W. Norton) In the mid-1500s, the ...

Few events have symbolised the strength of Iranian soft power quite as effectively as an activist in Chicago last April urging his attentive American audience of ‘trainee protesters’ to chant ‘marg ...

Over Christmas 1941 newspaper readers around Britain were gripped by headlines screaming ‘Escaped German’ and ‘German Escapee’. ‘Soldiers Hunt 6ft. German’, claimed the Daily Mail, who warned that the ...

In The Tafts, veteran Baltimore lawyer George W. Liebmann provides an account of five generations of the Ohio-based dynasty of Republicans, highly accomplished but less prone to self-advertisement ...

Every September two friends and I go on pilgrimage. They are both pretty devout – one is a priest. I am indulged as a wistful agnostic. Growing enthusiasm for the Camino de Santiago over recent ...