How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. I n March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of ...

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David ...

I n 1905 the prison population of England and Wales was 21,525 and rising. In the decade that followed, that number nearly ...

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.

On 25 June 1922 Black activist Marcus Garvey found common cause with the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I n the 30 ...

Greg Grandin has dedicated his career to the study of how United States imperialism shaped Latin America and how its Latin American empire shaped the United States. America, América may be his most ...

On 8 October 1982 Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative Party Conference that ‘the National Health Service is safe with us’. This would prove to be among her most memorable lines. However, as ...

Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels finds that the son of God is more than the sum of his parts. In the New Testament, Jesus is a charismatic miracle healer. He ...

The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century by Owen Hatherley follows in the footsteps of those who fled fascism. Perhaps you’ve heard the stories ...

In her 2010 memoir Tales from a Mountain City, Quynh Dao – who was 15 at the fall of Saigon in 1975 – describes returning to Dalat, a city in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, at the end of the war. The ...

Writing from the safety of exile in eastern Tennessee, in the late 1850s the fiery Irish nationalist John Mitchel published a series of articles in his proslavery newspaper the Southern Citizen. In ...

When it opened in 1881 the comic opera Patience was the first theatrical production in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. But the librettist, W.S. Gilbert, was no fan of scientific fashions.