It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity. Kate Loveman tells the tale. Arthur ...

Keith Houston’s history of emojis reveals that explicit images as well as political provocations, flagrant brand ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...

Annual global population growth is now just over a third of the peak level reached in the 1960s and the rate is falling fast.

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John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse; John Singer Sargent: The Charcoal Portraits by Richard Ormond ...

When Churchill declared victory, the young people of the church paraded a full-size effigy of Adolf Hitler to the green and ...

According to the American academic William Kelleher Storey, Rhodes was able to go a long way towards realising his vision ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

Edward Casaubon is one of the less appealing characters in Middlemarch. A selfish and ageing clergyman, whom Dorothea Brooke unwisely marries, he devotes his time and attention to an encyclopedic ...

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...