Historian Steven Gunn uncovers what thousands of fatal accidents can tell us about everyday existence in 16th-century England ...

Physicist Frank Close traces how British science – and fear of a Nazi bomb – lit the fuse for the nuclear age ...

Traversing the landscape of medieval Europe, they sang of longing, power and – whether implicitly or explicitly – sex. They moved from castle to court, debated morals and aphrodisiacs, and ...

Almost as soon as they were able to navigate the world on their own two feet, children were expected to obey, work and prepare for a life of duty, whether as farmers, soldiers, citizens or mothers.

This is how a royal Frankish dynasty turned flowing locks into a political weapon, and why cutting them could mean deadly exile ...

Behind the myth of the Minotaur lies the ancient Minoan civilisation – a culture steeped in ritual, rich in symbolism, and ...

During the Second World War, thousands of Allied pilots were deployed on a mission so dangerous, and so overshadowed by the rest of the conflict, that many referred to themselves grimly by the acronym ...

A Mesopotamian myth from nearly 4,000 years ago tells of a man who builds a boat to save the world from a divine flood, long before the Bible’s famous story ...

Stanislav Petrov was the man on duty at the Soviet Serpukhov-15 bunker where the satellite detection system, named Oko, was stationed. Taking in the data from the machine, he was confronted with an ...