People watching the Royal Wedding

United Kingdom

The Green Knight shows his severed – and still talking – head to King Arthur in this illustration of the beginning of the 14th century legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: what’s the story?

Portrait of Prince Philip

Prince Philip: the loyal consort

Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II with her husband Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, on their wedding day

The Prince Philip Years: how did Britain change while he was Queen Elizabeth II's consort?

Politicians in suits discuss the Paris Peace Treaty inside the Palace of Versailles

The Paris Peace Conference: everything you wanted to know

Vanguard-class submarine HMS Vigilant, the top above water

Britain’s nuclear deterrent: a brief history

An illustration of Henry VII, surrounded by Tudor roses. In the background there are shadows of those who challenged for his throne.

Henry VII: the greatest pretender

Dancers in a nightclub

Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain

Q&ADid the Scottish mass-murdering cannibal Sawney Bean actually exist?

A Hawker Hurricane of Fighter Command on its way to intercept German bombers as they crossed the south coast of England during the Battle of Britain, 1940. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

6 Battle of Britain myths

A Peep at St. Peter or The Poet in a Pickle

Q&AWhy do we say 'Peeping Tom'?

Photo of a man on a penny-farthing

Q&AHow dangerous was the penny-farthing?

An Anglo-Saxon cross from the church of St Michael

Anglo-Saxon conversion: the coming of the cross (at the point of a sword)

Two Hitler Youth who have surrendered to Allied Forces, Germany, 1945. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

First World War

Innocence under fire: how children were used in warfare of the past

A set of Tudor faces laid out on playing cards

Why the Tudors fell for courtly love

Historian Bettany Hughes in front of the Rock of Gibraltar

Bettany Hughes“We were trying to find stories that tell us about resilience – history as a kind of therapy”

Allied convoy PQ 17 is attacked by a German torpedo aircraft on its way across the Arctic Ocean, c1942. (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“The worst journey in the world”: the Arctic convoys of the Second World War

A portrait of Princess Elizabeth

The birth of Elizabeth I: everything you need to know

Soldiers disembark a landing craft with a battle on the beach beyond

How to win a 20th-century battle

In partnership with Gaijin War Thunder

A portrait of Lady Emma Hamilton

Nelson's sensational mistress: how Emma Hamilton took Europe by storm

Workers lower the bodywork of a Standard Vanguard car onto its chassis in a factory

Britain’s motor city: how Coventry's car industry roared to greatness – then went into reverse

Moves still from Rob Roy

How Walter Scott’s stories shaped Scotland

The rise of the Paralympics

A photograph of the England team that faced Australia at the Oval in the 1896 Ashes series

Batting for the British Empire: how Victorian cricket was more than just a game

Prince Charles with his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten at Windsor

Why was Lord Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s great-uncle, assassinated?

What’s next for period drama?

Portrait of English admiral Lord Horatio Nelson

Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson: a rebel with a cause

Joep de Beer of Holland throws a javelin at the Stoke Mandeville Games

Q&AWhen and where were the first Paralympics held?

William Wallace on trial in 1305

William Wallace: who was the Scottish rebel who defied Edward I?

British police history: everything you wanted to know

Working-class girlhood in 1930s Bolton