People watching the Royal Wedding

United Kingdom

Yorkshire’s top 10 historical sites as county prepares for Tour de France 2014

How did it become a gesture of well-wishing to say to an actor before they go on stage "break a leg"? (Photo by Andrys Lukowski via iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Q&AWhy do we say ‘Break a leg’?

The Stygian Lake in the Fifth Circle of Hell from from Dante’s epic poem 'The Inferno'. The phrase "Paint the town red" may originate from the sentence in the poem "we are they who painted the world scarlet with sins". (Photo by Getty Images)

Q&AWhy do we say ‘Paint the town red’?

Photo of Chelsea Pensioners

Q&ACould you really once be hanged for impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner?

Portrait of Henry VIII

Q&AWhich of Henry VIII's wives was his best match?.

Destroyer escorts fire depth charges against submarine raiders in the Atlantic during the Second World War. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

What the modern navy did for us.

English gardens and Latin American football.

Incent's House as it stands today on the Berkhamsted High Street. (Creative Commons)

The hunt for the Tudor hitman.

BBC History Magazine

James Clerk Maxwell, Israeli troops and John Dickens: 3 things that happened On This Day 13 June

A nurse on the French Eastern border treats a wounded soldier during the First World War. (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

Pain through the prism of war.

BBC History Magazine

Chloroform, Jean Harlow and the Marquess of Dorset: 3 things that happened On This Day 7 June

Second World War

The LibraryD-Day: James Holland answers your questions

BBC History Magazine

Voltaire, Vanessa Bell and Joan of Arc: 3 things that happened On This Day 30 May

Q&AWhere does the name ‘London’ come from?

A caricature of George I

The delightfully dysfunctional Georgians.

A coal mine explosion, the birth of Nancy Witcher Langhorne, and the first Briton in space: 5 things that happened On This Day 19 May

The princes in the Tower

Did Richard III murder the princes in the Tower? You debate.

Tracy Borman's Tudor quiz

'The butterfly hunt' (1874) by Berthe Morisot

The LibraryFirst ladies of art: three trailblazing female artists from history.

Photo of cat in cat flap

Q&AHow old is the cat flap?

An illustration from the first edition of John Foxe The Book of Martyrs. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The LibraryElizabeth I’s war with England’s Catholics

Portrait of Miranda Kaufmann. (Image by Jeni Nott)

History explorer: Africans in Tudor and Stuart Britain.

Canadian troops returning from the combined operations raid at Dieppe. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

The LibraryBritain and France: Empires under fire.

Portrait of King Henry VI by an unknown artist. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

The miracle of Henry VI: how the weak medieval king became a 'saint'.

American actor and singer Howard Keel records 'Kiss Me Kate' with his co-star Patricia Morrison, 1964. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The growing pains of BBC Two.

Living in the shadow of the workhouse.

Picture depicting the Articles of Union being presented to Queen Anne

Q&AWhy did Scotland join the 1707 Union with England?

Shakespeare: 7 burning questions about his life.

Britain in the 1970s.

The Palace of Westminster

Q&AWhy do we call the British government ‘Whitehall’?