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.

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 ...

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?

Before the Spanish conquest, the history of the Aztec Empire was recorded orally and with hieroglyphs. In danger of being lost or forgotten, Indigenous historians began to write it down. In Mexico ...

The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling From the Dawn of Print to the 21st Century by Andrew Pettegree reveals the hard graft and innovation behind the book trade. Few commercial enterprises possess as ...

A new translation marks the 50th anniversary of Carlo Ginzburg’s pioneering microhistory The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. In 1599 the poet Edmund Spenser died.

In May 1876 the diarist Francis Kilvert was visiting Oxford. Enjoying a peaceful sunny day in a quiet college garden, he suddenly heard a disturbance: ‘the voices and laughter and trampling of a ...

The sinking of the White Ship was a disaster for England’s King Henry I, but it was also felt deeply by his subjects. On 25 November 1120 King Henry I of England, son of William the Conqueror, was in ...