Feature

As told by one medieval chronicler, Britain’s past and future had been prophesied by Merlin, who foresaw its rise, fall and conquest. Did the magician have warnings for the present?

Anne of Cleves became known to posterity as the ‘Flanders Mare’ and Henry VIII’s ‘ugly wife’, thanks to disparaging descriptions by ambassadors and diplomats. What motivated them?

When four men were accused of an act of ‘gross indecency’ in 1950s Belfast, just three were put on trial. Despite efforts by the unionist government to protect a member of a prominent local family, not everyone was willing to be complicit in a cover-up.

Dogged by rumours of stolen thrones and treachery, the Capetians were nonetheless one of the most successful dynasties of the medieval West.

In the era of the early modern ‘secret state’, two notorious brothers set up an elaborate intelligence network, managing a vast array of spies and informers watchful for Jacobite plots against Britain.

Just two countries supported the Republic during the Spanish Civil War: the Soviet Union and Mexico. While Soviet help came with strings attached, Mexico’s reflected the country’s contentious relationship with its old colonial master.

The 14th century was a period of great upheaval. People yearned for the good old days, when everyone knew their place, prices were lower and kings were better.

An exiled revolutionary, André Rigaud’s return to the island of his birth changed Haiti’s political destiny. Was he sent back to help reinstate slavery? His enemies would have us believe so.

Mutiny and murder at sea ended in capture for the crew of the pirate ship Revenge. Their trial was a deliberate display of the authority of the British state. How did it unfold?

Once maligned as a record ‘of the dullest kind’, a 1535 audit of Church wealth – the Valor ecclesiasticus – offers a unique view of England’s religious, social and cultural life just months after the break with Rome.