Teodoro Castro or Iosif Grigulevich? Costa Rica’s ambassador to Yugoslavia was a Soviet spy sent to kill Tito. O n the ...

Zaga Christ died on 22 April 1638 leaving Europe no wiser as to the authenticity of the self-proclaimed Ethiopian prince who ...

Renaissance Florence had a problem: it wanted female sex workers, but it also needed to offer them a way out. The solution was a new brothel district – and a nunnery for former prostitutes ...

Bolesław Chrobry was finally crowned king of Poland on 18 April 1025. It was an elevation two decades in the making. Otto III ...

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw himself as a puppet-master, engineering British politics from afar in his feud ...

The traditional date for the founding of the greatest city of the Western world was the product of guesswork by Roman writers of the late centuries BC, working backwards from their own time. There ...

Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss Edited by Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (Hambledon xxviii + 270 pp.) The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John ...

Saint Ignatius of Loyola began his career as an ambitious army officer with, as he recalled, ‘a great and vain desire to win renown’. In time he would become a general, but of a religious order rather ...

Ethelred the Unready (or the ‘Ill Advised’) became King of England in 978 at the age of ten and new Viking raids on his country began in the 980s. The young king’s principal adviser was Dunstan, ...

When he was elected doge in 1354, Marin Falier was a veteran of 76. Two of his family had held the office before him and he himself had done the Republic much service. He had been a member of the ...

Before hitting the Hollywood big time, Mae West began writing plays in the 1920s under the pen name ‘Jane Mast’. Her works dealt with themes that were avant-garde for the time, such as sex and gay ...