Africa

Ramesses II holding prisoners

Was Ramesses II really that great?

Explorer Ferdinand Magellan

Dire straits: Ferdinand Magellan’s fatal voyage of discovery

Marble bust of Emperor Caligula. (DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

The 8 bloodiest Roman emperors in history

Great Pyramid of Giza

5 facts about the Great Pyramid of Giza

c50 BC, Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, the last and most famous of the Ptolemaic dynasty. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

6 things you (probably) didn’t know about Cleopatra

A 16th-century map showing Magellan's ship

A voyage from hell: how Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world changed history

Emma Dabiri. (Photo by Fran Monks)

Why black hair matters

The Suez canal

How significant was the Suez Crisis?

Dornier 217 bombers of the Luftwaffe bomb London during the Battle of Britain.

9 of the most overrated battles in history (and one underrated one)

St Catharine's College, Cambridge has already removed a bell from view after concluding it came from a slave plantation. (Image by Alamy)

Anna Whitelock Confronting slavery’s legacy

(Image by Bettmann/Getty)

10 photographs that made history

Great Pyramid of Giza. Egypt. (Photo by Olgakostenko | Dreamstime.com)

10 of the most surprising numbers in history

British Indian soldiers stand at attention prior to inspection at Singapore, December 1941. (Photo by Alamy)

Second World War

World War Two’s ‘ordinary’ soldiers

Passengers reading a newspaper while waiting to disembark from the 'Empire Windrush' at Tilbury, having sailed from Jamaica, taken by an unknown photographer for the Daily Herald newspaper, 21 June 1948.

Do we need to decolonise history? And if so, how?

Julian Baggini and Justin Champion. (Photo by Fran Monks)

A global history of philosophy