Georgian

Cavalry charge into a crowd of protesters at St Peter's Field, Manchester, as depicted in an 1819 engraving. What followed was the worst violence ever to occur at a political meeting in Britain. (Picture by Alamy)

The Peterloo Massacre

Mike Leigh at the 67th Cannes Film Festival in 2014. (Photo by dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo)

Mike Leigh on Peterloo

Adam Zamoyski, photographed in London. "We're brought up on a whole ant-heap of myths about Napoleon. The apocryphal stories that swirl around him are legion," he says. (Photography by Frank Monks for BBC History Magazine)

Books interview with Adam Zamoyski: “Napoleon was motivated by profound insecurity”

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Trick photograph. (Photo by LM Melander and Brothers) entitled 'The Haunted Lane,' depicts a pair of men terrified by a female ghost, mid-to-late 19th century. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

5 historic hauntings for Halloween

18th August 1819: 'The Massacre of Peterloo or Britons Strike Home', by George Cruikshank (Photo by Spencer Arnold/Getty Images)

The Peterloo Massacre

Lady Sarah Frances Elizabeth Armstrong-Jones (centre) – the daughter of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, Earl of Snowdon – was born seventh in line to the throne. (Photo by Terry Fincher/Daily Express/Getty Images)

7 royal babies who were once seventh in line to the throne

Illustration from Dante's ‘Inferno’, the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem ‘Divine Comedy’, depicting thieves tormented in hell by serpents. Engraving by Gustave Dore, 1885. (Photo by Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis via Getty Images)

General ancient history

A brief history of the afterlife

The miller Samuel Wood, whose arm and scapula were torn off when entangled in a rope attached to a moving mill machinery in 1737. (Photo by Alamy)

7 bizarre cases in the history of medicine

A portrait of the romantic novelist Jane Austen. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The real reason Jane Austen never married

A portrait of Jane Austen. (Photo by Stock Montage/Stock Montage/Getty Images)

In profile: Jane Austen

Portrait of Marie Antoinette in deep mourning, while in prison. (Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

The final days of Marie Antoinette

Diana, Princess Of Wales, Prince William And Prince Harry visit Thorpe Park amusement park. (Photo by Julian Parker/UK Press via Getty Images)

How to raise a royal… with Tracy Borman

Britain's Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge show their newly-born daughter and their second child Princess Charlotte, to the media outside St Mary's Hospital in central London, in May 2015. (Photo by Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

5 momentous royal births

Between 1613 and 1754, a legal loophole meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’. (Photo by Getty Images)

10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of London