How to finance old age has been a problem since the inception of Britain’s welfare state. Why is pension reform so difficult?

In exile, Hortense Mancini captivated 17th-century Europe – and king Charles II – with her beauty and charm. But her path to freedom was mired in scandal.

Postwar state support for agriculture in the UK has been hailed a great success, but it had unexpected consequences. P rewar Britain was dependent on imported food; in 1938, 70 per cent of the cash ...

Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor could be very different. A n unprecedented number of pilgrims travelled to ...

The Maginot Line: A New History by Kevin Passmore confronts the myths surrounding the fall of France in 1940.

The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print.

Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of Cromwell’s Spy, Dennis Sewell asks whether George Downing was the ‘biggest scoundrel in Stuart England’? D owning Street is globally recognised as the home of ...

The colony of New South Wales did not have its own parliament until 1856, but it did have a tradition of public dinners and politically charged toasts.

Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews. Her latest book is House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France (Allen Lane, 2024).

How can historians of Tibet – a region whose history is tightly controlled by the Chinese authorities – gain access to its recent past? Comparing newspapers from either side of the Himalayas might ...

Henry VIII’s break with Rome was a watershed moment for England and for Christendom. Did the papacy have itself to blame?

On 14 November 1848 the Fox sisters conjured up a movement when they made contact with the dead – or so they claimed.