On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...

Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily ...

The day before the armistice on 11 November 1918, Winston Churchill told the British War Cabinet, ‘We might have to build up the German Army, as it is important to get Germany on her legs again for ...

Once you unstop your ears to its music, the siren song of the American road is hard to resist. I made my first coast-to-coast drive at the age of nineteen, setting out with a friend in my battered ...

As the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence approaches, President Trump has spread anti-Americanism more widely than at any time since the Vietnam War. Fifty years ago, Sarah ...

Taller with the Charm On - The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III by Edward Shawcross ...

Reports from Cuba by J S Tennant ...

For many, what would come to be known as Christianity was still a Jewish sect operating within the confines of the established Law (ie the teachings of the Torah). Yet Christianity was cosmopolitan ...

Six of the Best - The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World by Bojan Pancevski ...

The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker ...

That episode is pivotal in Liaquat Ahamed’s panorama of the origins of an era of deflation, stagnation and unrest – the ‘first Great Depression’ – that afflicted much of the world for the rest of the ...