On 6 October 1802 Ludwig van Beethoven confessed his despair at the loss of his hearing in the Heiligenstadt Testament.

Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four by Susan Pedersen wonders whether a radical relationship might offer inspiration for a ...

The Making of a Prehistoric Human by Peter Sahlins charts the ascent of an idea from prehistory to popular culture.

Wikipedia turns 25 this year. Its success was not a given and reveals much about our changing relationship with information online.

In 1938 a sensational spy trial exposed a Nazi plot to seduce and blackmail US officers. Despite America’s technological ...

In 1355 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, by common consent the most important post-antique Roman lawyer, wrote a brief treatise ...

Philip Hensher’s A History of the Novel in Britain is certainly novel but how does it fare as history?

Why should the things we love be the first things sacrificed to a bleak future no one asked for?’ Martha Vandrei is Senior ...

Coal merchant and concert promoter Thomas Britton passed away on 27 September 1714 after a prank went awry. T here was plenty of music in Restoration London, but for those in the know the best place ...

They have long had a notorious reputation as the raiders and pirates of the medieval world and certainly it is not unjustified: their raids were fearsome and long-running. However, they were also ...

‘One could lose one’s faith from that picture.’ Those were the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his wife Anna on seeing this painting of a ‘startlingly dead’ Christ in the Swiss city of Basel in 1867.