Early comic panel illustration

England

A 19th-century engraving. A young woman plays a harp, singing a duet with a man holding the music book, Duets de L’Amour. (Photo by Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

A survivor's guide to Georgian marriage

A cartoon depicting the Duke of Wellington, who demands attention outside a house, while the Duke of Argyll, inside with Harriette Wilson, pretends not to recognise him.

Georgian Britain: sex in high places

A portrait of Samuel Pepys, English writer and diarist. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Samuel Pepys

An East India Company official riding on an elephant

The East India Company: how a trading corporation became an imperial ruler

Alexander Ludwig as Bjorn Ironside, son Ragnar Lothbrok and king of Kattegat

Vikings Season 6: plot recap, plus 8 historical questions answered

Thomas Becket: from murder to martyrdom

Rege-Jean Page as Simon Basset and Phoebe Dynevor as Daphne Bridgerton

Bridgerton season one: “A period drama like no other”

The Wars of the Roses: everything you wanted to know

Charles Dickens: prison reformer, scourge of capitalists, champion of the poor

Workers repair Fleet sewer in 1854. London’s creaking sewer network sparked anxieties over what lay beneath the sprawling capital. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Living in fear: the dangers of Victorian London

Christmas ghost stories

The effigy of Eleanor of Castile on her tomb

The love lives of medieval queens

Were the suffragettes terrorists?

Ten things to do with a medieval donkey

Magna Carta: everything you wanted to know

Richard III

Richard the radical: was Richard III a champion of the people?

Nelson's passion for Emma – with whom he had a six-year affair – is writ large in his letters

Nelson in his own words

History heroAndrew Marr chooses Charles Darwin (1809–82)

Portchester Castle in Hampshire was intended as a coastal defence against raiders. (Photo by Getty Images)

The collapse of Roman Britain: what happened, plus 9 places which tell us more

Fishbourne Roman Palace, plus 5 more Roman mosaics you can explore in Britain

Imperialism on the oceans

Wrens operating the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park, 1943

Second World War

Your guide to Bletchley Park, the key WW2 decryption centre

Jane Austen's fiction: an accurate portrayal of life in Georgian England?

Rushton Triangular Lodge was ostensibly a warrener's lodge but the biblical references that adorn its three exterior walls tell a different story. (Photo English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

History explorer: Catholic resistance to Elizabeth I

The orphan hero who fought at Trafalgar

This engraving by William Hogarth shows the final instalment of a sequence of artworks called 'The Four Stages of Cruelty' (1751). In it, the fictional Tom Nero is being dissected for anatomical studies at Cutlerian theatre near Newgate prison after being hanged for murder. Nero looks like the Dead-Alive, as though he can see and smell his own executed body on the dissection table. The chief physician sits in the centre on a high-backed chair, resembling a high court judge. He is surrounded by various medical men, including penal surgeons, who did gallows work. The skeletons of dissected criminals were usually refused a Christian burial and so were displayed as specimens, as can be seen top left and top right. (Photo by Guildhall Library/Getty Images)

Surviving the gallows: the Georgian hangings that didn't go to plan

The colonial secrets of Britain’s stately homes

How did the Reformation impact Jews?

Scrooge and Marley's ghost

Q&AWhy do we say ‘Bah Humbug’ and what does it mean?

David Olusoga“Desks went from a niche furniture item to the work station of millions”