Nile Green is Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA and author of Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (W.W. Norton) In the mid-1500s, the ...

The period sometimes referred to as the ‘second Viking Age’ witnessed a new intensification of Scandinavian attacks on England, starting with the English defeat at the Battle of Maldon in 991 and ...

Few events have symbolised the strength of Iranian soft power quite as effectively as an activist in Chicago last April urging his attentive American audience of ‘trainee protesters’ to chant ‘marg ...

Every September two friends and I go on pilgrimage. They are both pretty devout – one is a priest. I am indulged as a wistful agnostic. Growing enthusiasm for the Camino de Santiago over recent ...

Isaac Watts had gone to visit the Abneys thirty-six years before, in 1712, when they lived in Hertfordshire, intending to stay for a week, but he never managed to leave. He was buried, as he had ...

To the British officials in Nigeria they were the Aba Riots. But the Igbo and Ibibio women involved called them Ogu Umunwaanyi, the Women’s War. There had been tremors of discontent in 1925: in April ...

On November 23rd, 1499, Perkin Warbeck was drawn on a hurdle from the Tower to Tyburn to be hanged. A native of Tournai, his six-year masquerade as Richard, Duke of York had come to an end two years ...

Over Christmas 1941 newspaper readers around Britain were gripped by headlines screaming ‘Escaped German’ and ‘German Escapee’. ‘Soldiers Hunt 6ft. German’, claimed the Daily Mail, who warned that the ...