People watching the Royal Wedding

United Kingdom

Elizabeth II and Prince Philip with their third son, Prince Edward, on the balcony at Buckingham Palace. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A brief history of royal mothers and childbirth.

17th September 1936: The British minister of health, Sir Kingsley Wood, watches nurses weighing newborn twins during a visit to Southmead Hospital in Bristol to see the work local authorities were doing for the maintenance and improvement of health and housing conditions. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Mum hacks: 5 tips for new mothers from history.

A nurse, a banker and… a TV producer? The royals through history who have held other jobs.

Wales’s turbulent 20th century.

The cast of Belgravia

Behind the scenes on Belgravia.

A short history of quarantine.

Resistance in the British empire.

Anti-suffrage: the women who didn't want the vote.

A line-up of girls ready to play football, somewhere in England during the First World War, c1917. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)

First World War

10 facts you (probably) didn't know about the First World War

Queen Elizabeth greets the crowd from the top of a huge elephant minutely decorated during a walk to the gates of the Jaipur Palace, c1961 in Jaipur, India. (Photo by Keystone-FranceGamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

The Queen and the Commonwealth: a force for international change?.

Female aviators Dorothy Spicer and Pauline Gower in a bungalow in Reading, 9 September 1931. Gower later became an officer of the Air Transport Auxiliary's No 5 Ferry Pilots Pool. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

When women flew Spitfires.

Stonemason Andrew Ziminski. (Photo by David Hampton)

Written in stone.

A portrait of Thomas Cromwell

The Mirror & The Light book review: Hilary Mantel's epic finale "lives up to the hype".

A portrait of Edward IV, the first Yorkist king of England. From the National Portrait Gallery. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Edward IV: champion of the Wars of the Roses

The (not so) stinky Middle Ages: why medieval people were cleaner than we think

Illustration by Owen Davey

General History

A brief history of human filth: how did people try to keep clean in the past?

Four women dressed in the perceived fashion of the roaring twenties in a 1954 musical called ‘The Boy Friend’. (Photo by Getty Images)

How the ‘Roaring Twenties’ myth obscures the making of modern Britain

London’s trailblazing women.

Keith Granville, managing director of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation), holding a model of the Boeing 747 jet, with the new aircraft hangars under construction in the background, at Heathrow Airport, 17 March 1969. (Photo by Jim Gray/Keystone/Getty Images)

In pictures: the history of London’s Heathrow Airport

Lindisfarne Castle, Northumberland. (Photo by Dreamstime)

Secrets of Lindisfarne.

Depiction of the five senses (sight, sound, taste, smell and touch) by a late 18th/early 19th unknown artist. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)

5 smells that made Georgian England.

The Jacobite rebellions: how close were they to returning the Stuarts to power?

Nancy Astor on the campaign trail in 1919

Nancy Astor facts: who was the first female MP in British history to take her seat in parliament?

Millennium Centre, Cardiff. (Photo by Dreamstime)

Simon Jenkins: "Wales needs to get over England and be Wales again".

The rise of the cat burglar.

Andrew Ziminski pictured at his workshop in Somerset.

Andrew Ziminski"The stonework at Stonehenge is a Gordian knot of mind-bogglingness".

Sylvia Pankhurst is taken into custody

History heroEmma Barnett chooses Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960).

A Burglar Looks In, Picture Post 1950. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Burglary: a modern history.

Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret: why did their marriage break down?

Michael Wood on the Peterloo photograph.