What the war released above all was a spirit of ephemerality’ Mark Polizzotti is Head of Publications at the Metropolitan ...

When the connoisseur Gerrit Braamcamp died in 1771 the auction of his collection was one of Amsterdam’s events of the year. Some 20,000 people saw it; 2,000 copies of the catalogue were sold.

When his father, Rama II, died in 1824 the Siamese throne went to Mongkut’s older half-brother, who ruled as Rama III. Mongkut, aged 19, joined a monastery. Three months was customary. Mongkut stayed ...

A rather unusual petition from October 1716 is tucked away in the pope’s diocesan archives in the basilica of San Giovanni in Rome: Antonio Piervenanzi, parish priest of San Benedetto in Piscinola, ...

In June 1947 Kenneth Arnold was flying a small plane over Mount Rainier in Washington when nine bright objects began tracking him at high speed. People have always seen signs and wonders in the skies, ...

American democracy has been haunted by the spectre of a Caesar-type figure since the birth of the republic. Have such fears ever been justified?

On 27 October 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic came into being as part of the Soviet Union, four years after a group of Muslim modernisers had formed an unholy alliance with a cohort of ...

‘What historical topic have I changed my mind on? The British in India, who I once looked upon as a benign force.’ ...

In the summer of 1940 millions of French men and women were beginning to grasp the reality of the Armistice signed by Marshal Pétain on 22 June that year. The elderly First World War veteran – known ...

In 1866 James Hole, a writer from Leeds, called for ‘a little wholesome despotism’ in tackling the problems of housing the urban working classes. He was not alone in favouring a no-nonsense, top-down ...