Unfortunately, most of Euripides’ work has not come down to us. Only 17 complete tragedies and one satyr play have survived.

What the war released above all was a spirit of ephemerality’ Mark Polizzotti is Head of Publications at the Metropolitan ...

H elen Cam (1885-1968), the first woman to be elected to a chair at Harvard, was a formidable English medievalist. Unusually ...

On 9 October 1771 masterpieces of Dutch art destined for Catherine the Great sank with the Vrouw Maria off the coast of ...

The ballad, then, underscores the sensational, multimedia nature of the Logroño auto de fe, which laid bare a nightmarish ...

When his father, Rama II, died in 1824 the Siamese throne went to Mongkut’s older half-brother, who ruled as Rama III. Mongkut, aged 19, joined a monastery. Three months was customary. Mongkut stayed ...

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett picks through the fragments of George Villiers, James VI & I’s favourite mistake. Reading The Scapegoat ...

The Grand Principality of Moscow gained its independence from the Mongol Golden Horde in the fifteenth century under Ivan III, the Great, who vastly extended Muscovite territory. His grandson Ivan IV, ...

In 1866 James Hole, a writer from Leeds, called for ‘a little wholesome despotism’ in tackling the problems of housing the urban working classes. He was not alone in favouring a no-nonsense, top-down ...

Hitler had previously started rearming Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938. He was now determined to seize the Sudetenland, ...

The baby was born at one of his mother’s favourite residences, Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the fourth and youngest son of his family. His older brothers were Edward, who was ten, Edmund, ...

The Nationalists had run out of steam and Communist armies took Nanjing in April and Shanghai in May. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference was summoned to Beijing, where Mao opened ...