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

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 ...

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

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 ...

Catherine of Siena (1347-80) was made a saint in 1461, less than a century after she died. In 1970 Pope Paul VI declared her a Doctor of the Church, a rare title given only to saints who have made ...

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 ...

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, ...

Hungary had been ruled successively by Turkish sultans and Austrian emperors for centuries when the 1848 upsurge of revolutionary nationalism in Europe struck Budapest, where liberty, equality and ...

When James VI of Scots rode south to London in 1603 to be crowned as James I of England, he called himself King of Great Britain. He hoped for a union of his two realms and tried to sell the idea to ...