Patricia Fara is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and a columnist at History Today.

Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King by Gareth Russell illuminates the inner life and passions of James VI ...

As Christianity spread, it carried Catherine of Siena’s legacy to the Americas. Her asceticism inspired Rose of Lima, Kateri ...

Scholars and Their Kin: Historical Explorations, Literary Experiments, edited by Stéphane Gerson, draws historians closer to the home.

In 1966 and 1967 a group of left-wing intellectuals and radical activists, recruited by the nonagenarian philosopher Bertrand Russell, constituted themselves into a self-proclaimed ‘tribunal’ to try ...

The morning after Edward VII was crowned King of Great Britain and Emperor of India in Westminster Abbey, Canon Welldon treated the colonial troops who had attended the ceremony to a valedictory ...

Historians may no longer talk of a single Celtic culture, but in The Celts: A Modern History Ian Stewart crafts a unified history of a changing idea. This is a big, ambitious, erudite book. After a ...

Early on in this masterful account of Buddhism’s emergence and spread throughout the world, Donald S. Lopez cautions his readers that the very existence of a historical Buddha remains subject to ...

Before the Library of Alexandria there was the Library of Ashurbanipal – an Assyrian king who collected the knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia under one roof. This incredible library was forgotten for ...

Alice Hunt is Professor of Early Modern Literature and History at the University of Southampton and author of Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660 (Faber and Faber) The technical answer ...

The death-knell of the Chartist movement in Britain sounded on what was meant to be its day of triumph. In a year when thrones tottered and regimes quailed as revolutions broke out all over Europe, ...