Historian Selena Wisnom explores how Ashurbanipal, the last great ruler of Assyria, combined calculated brutality with an ...

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 ...

When Old Norse explorers reached North America, they made history. But their brief, violent encounter with its indigenous peoples shows how cultural collisions could end in chaos. Historian and Viking ...

In the Boyne Valley of eastern Ireland stands one of the world’s most fascinating prehistoric monuments: Newgrange. Centuries older than the Pyramids of Giza or Stonehenge, Newgrange is a large ...

More than six years since Professor George Garnett totted up the depictions of male genitalia in the famous Bayeux Tapestry – causing a media storm in the process – and he has no regrets. Speaking to ...

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 ...