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.

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

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

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 ...

Charles Hatry’s fraudulent business empire collapsed on 20 September 1929. It was the biggest crash the London stock market had ever seen.

On 30 May 1935, 28 riders left Ashgabat, the capital of Soviet Turkmenistan, on what may be the most improbable petition in the history of animal husbandry. They would ride to Moscow, some 4,300 ...

‘Good Jesu, what will you do with my heart?’ These were supposedly the final words of Prior John Houghton, as the knife plunged into his chest. He was executed on 4 May 1535: a brutal business at ...