Who could fail to be fascinated by the ancient world? From the pyramids of Egypt to the great emperors of Rome, it is filled with astonishing stories, momentous achievements and people who can be both surprisingly similar and utterly different to...
The medieval era is often viewed through the eyes of the elites: the kings, queens, knights and church leaders who dominated Europe at the time. But what would life have been like for the ordinary people who made up the vast majority of the...
ONE HUNDRED AND fifty years ago this July, Union and Confederate armies clashed close to the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Although few realised it at the time, this three-day battle – a Union victory – was to become a defining moment of the...
William Shakespeare died 400 hundred years ago, on 23 April 1616 – and to mark the anniversary we’ve created this special edition of BBC History Magazine to commemorate his life and times. The World of Shakespeare features insightful articles...
It is surely the most famous date in English history. On 14 October 1066 William of Normandy’s army defeated and killed King Harold at the battle of Hastings. It was the decisive moment in the Norman conquest of England, which heralded the end of...
From the crumbling of Roman rule in the fifth century AD until the triumph of the Normans (themselves descended from Norsemen) in 1066, Britain’s – and especially England’s – history is dominated by two groups: the Anglo-Saxons and the...
Just like the Tudors who preceded them, the Stuarts reigned (over a united kingdom, at least) for little more than a century. But, as with the Tudors, their years of rule coincided with some of the most dramatic events in British history, incidents...
Spies are everywhere. Or, at least, the fictional ones are. Every year a host of new books, films and television series tell the stories of secret agents who engage in thrilling adventures in the world of shadows. As for the real spies, their faces...
Central to three major faiths, the land that is now Israel and the Palestinian territories has a global significance that far exceeds its small size. It is, of course, bitterly contested today, with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute seemingly one of...
Four of this country’s Hanoverian kings gave their name to a dynamic era characterised by immense social change and British expansion throughout the world. The dramatic events and characters of the Georgian period (1714–1837, including the short...