The colony of New South Wales did not have its own parliament until 1856, but it did have a tradition of public dinners and politically charged toasts.

Henry VIII’s break with Rome was a watershed moment for England and for Christendom. Did the papacy have itself to blame?

Rome welcomed and tended to the vast numbers of pilgrims who arrived in the 16th century, but its attitude to its own poor could be very different. A n unprecedented number of pilgrims travelled to ...

Postwar state support for agriculture in the UK has been hailed a great success, but it had unexpected consequences. P rewar Britain was dependent on imported food; in 1938, 70 per cent of the cash ...

The Maginot Line: A New History by Kevin Passmore confronts the myths surrounding the fall of France in 1940.

The ancestor of the London Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665, surviving its bitter rival to become the oldest newspaper in the English-speaking world still in print.

Justine Firnhaber-Baker is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews. Her latest book is House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France (Allen Lane, 2024).

At its height Oxford’s book trade enjoyed the establishment of Dominican and Franciscan friaries in need of books for university activities and preaching, and an early demand from lay figures for ...

What makes a state? Is it its people, its borders, its government, or does it rest on recognition from international powers? Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the process by which states have been ...

On 20 June 1940, with the threat of large-scale enemy bombing looming ever closer and the Battle of Britain imminent, a letter from the Ministry of Home Security was sent to selected town clerks ...

Early in 1221 the army of the Fifth Crusade was encamped in the city of Damietta in northern Egypt. As it planned its next move, messengers began to arrive bearing wondrous news. An army was ...

On a bleak morning in January 1918 one of the oddest military formations ever put into the field by imperial Britain set out from Khanaqin, in what is now Iraq, to cross the border into Persia.