On 17 June 1940, when Marshal Pétain surrendered France to the Nazis, 49-year-old General Charles de Gaulle was in London. The next day he made a broadcast on the BBC: ‘Whatever happens, the flame of ...

Depending on one’s vantage point, the meaning of the French Revolution varies. The First Republic succumbed to an imperial ...

The wine trade in medieval Tunis was lucrative, but it caused a moral quandary for the ruling Hafsids.

An early modern ship’s surgeon had to treat not just broken bones but distress and trauma. I n September 1649 ship’s surgeon ...

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz, collects the works of Cuba's ‘Apostle of Independence’.

In March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) – sat down with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on her roundtable discussion programme Prospects of ...

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received.

As a young man, the not-yet-famous philosopher René Descartes lived for a while in a very famous place: Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 20 km outside Paris, where French kings had been building magnificent ...

America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin finds a place for Latin America and its ideals in the story of the United States.

The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker sheds light on the Soviet Union’s undercover intelligence gathering.

In September 1099 a letter addressed to Pope Paschal II sent from Latakia, in present-day Syria, recounted a number of important events taking place during the First Crusade. As well as Latin ...