November 2019

Expert articles from the November 2019 issue of BBC History Magazine

An African man after being liberated from a slave ship by the Royal Navy, 1871. In all, more than 12 million captives were loaded onto Atlantic slavers’ vessels. (Pictures from History/Bridgeman Images)

A brief guide to the transatlantic slave trade

Richard III, Edward IV and George, Duke of Clarence

Blood brothers: Richard III’s battle with his siblings

Setting a trap: East German soldiers construct the Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961. The barrier was an attempt to stop the flood of Germans fleeing from east to west – yet, as scores of audacious escape bids attest, it didn't entirely succeed. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Escape from East Berlin: an audacious bid to tunnel under the Berlin Wall

Margaret Thatcher surrounded by British soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment, during a surprise visit to the Falkland Islands, January 1983. Britain has

How the Falklands War fired up Britain

Seismic splits: This map from c1659 shows blood being spilled across the British Isles during the Civil Wars. Charles II's agenda for restoring order to his kingdoms was a cocktail of pragmatism, compromise and brutality.

How Charles II put Britain back together after the Civil War

War criminal? William the Conqueror shown on horseback in the Bayeux Tapestry. The king's Harrying of the North was a military success but a human catastrophe – one that even appalled chroniclers traditionally sympathetic to the Norman regime. (Photo by Bridgeman)

Was William the Conqueror a war criminal? The brutal story of the Harrying of the North

Giant of literature: A page from the 'Beowulf' manuscript. The story is fictional but some of the characters within it were real people, and others were believed to be the ancestors of Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings. (Photo by Alamy)

Beowulf: The Anglo-Saxons’ action hero

Half-timbered medieval cottages, Water Street, Lavenham, Suffolk, England, (Photo by Getty Images)

History explorer A wealth of history: Laversham, Sulfolk

William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer and historian based in India. (Photo by Bikramjt Bose)

“This was a corporation that could topple kings”: William Dalrymple on the East India Company

British journalist Tom Wintringham (1898–1949), the candidate for the Christian Socialist Commonwealth Party. (Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Second World War

My history hero Tom Wintringham (1898–1949)