Period

In 1945 there were two million more ‘potential’ households than actual homes, in part exacerbated by the wartime damage to housing stock (Coventry, for example, lost one third of its homes in the Blitz). Here, displaced people in east London wait on the street. (Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A history of homelessness. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Oxtail stew. (© CICO Books 2017)

Top 5 Dickensian recipes. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

What if JFK had lived?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

An aerial view showing the courtroom during the Nuremberg Trials, November 1945. (Photo by Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Forgotten trials: the other side of Nuremberg. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP) is approaching Omaha Beach, Normandy, France, 6th June 1944. (Photo by Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)

Tales from D-Day. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Photograph of the Wounded British Soldiers at the Battle of the Somme. Dated 1916. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

First World War

8 things you (probably) didn’t know about the battle of the Somme

Henry III (1207-1272), king of England from 1216. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

10 reasons why Henry III may have been a great king. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Bernard Cornwell. (Photo by Felix Clay)

Bernard Cornwell on The Last Kingdom. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

How to throw a medieval feast. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting a naked man with an erection reaching out towards a naked woman, who is covering both her face and her pudenda with her hands. (© Bayeux Museum)

The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry's 93 penises tell us?

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher, 1934. (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)

Nietzsche’s dangerous ideas. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The American Revolutionary War: birth of a superpower

A wounded soldier of Company K, 110th Regiment Infantry, receives first-aid treatment from a comrade in Varennes-en-Argonne, France, 26 September 1918. (Photo by Corbis via Getty Images)

First World War

First World War soldiers: life after the Armistice

The First World War promoted advances in medicine, and in sectors such as aviation, that had not just military but also peacetime benefits, says David Stevenson. Here Captain Francis Derwent Wood treats the face of a patient, creating a mask which matches as closely as possible to the man's faces before he was injured, c1916. (Photo by Horace Nicholls/ IWM via Getty Images)

The First World War: what was it good for?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Dan Snow on shell shock.

Dan Snow on shell shock. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

British war correspondents and press officers, western front, c1917. From the Great War Vol .10 published in 1918 FR left to right: Percival Phillips; Colonel Hutton Wilson; Beach Thomas; Captain Stewart. Standing: Basil Clark; Perry Robinson; Percival Gibbon. (Photo by Alamy)

Censorship in the trenches: why didn’t journalists report the horrors of the First World War?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Women of the Sarah Caswell Angell chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, engaging in war work activities to assist the Allied cause during the First World War, 1918. During their sessions they knitted, made hospital garments, sewed for French children, and made aviators' vests. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

First World War

A–Z of the First World War

An American recruitment poster. “US forces showed an impressive ability to learn at speed,” says Nick Lloyd. (© Getty)

The great misconceptions of the First World War. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

British troops in the trenches, Belgium, c1914–15. The horrors of the First World War lived long in the memories of its centenarian survivors. (Photo by Fotosearch/Getty Images)

The last survivors of the First World War. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

News of the end of World War I hostilities is joyfully received by the men of the 64th Regiment Infantry, 7th Division. Min de Jaueny, Moselle, France on November 11, 1918. (Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images)

The end of the First World War. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The Spanish Armada defeated in the English Channel in July 1588, by Hendrick Cornelis Vroom, c1600. (Picture by DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/Getty Images)

10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Spanish Armada

Rags and riches: Enslaved people wash diamonds in Brazil, guarded by armed overseers, in a German engraving of 1828. Diamonds were discovered in Minas Gerais state in the late 17th century. (Picture by Alamy)

Brazil: a society shaped by slavery. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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

"Peterloo felt relevant, given all the crazy and chaotic things that are happening now": Mike Leigh on a massacre

A wooden cross marks the spot, just over 20 miles west of Newcastle, where Oswald apparently raised his own cross before ambushing Cadwallon. If the Anglo-Saxon warlord's attack had failed, writes Edoardo Albert, England might now be a lot smaller. (Photo by Getty Images)

Hell in Heavenfield: the Anglo-Saxon battle "as important as Hastings". This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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

Mike Leigh on Peterloo. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt exchanged almost 700 messages during the Second World War. (Illustration by Hugh Cowling for BBC History Magazine)

Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three’s war of words. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Combat helicopters fly over US troops during a search and destroy mission, South Vietnam. Despite their military might, argues Max Hastings, the Americans were doomed to fail during the Vietnam War. (Photo by Patrick Christain/Getty Images)

Max Hastings on Vietnam. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor visited the US on several occasions, where he was held in such high regard that he was dubbed the 'African Mahler'. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)

My history hero: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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”. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Our illustration shows King Arthur leading his troops into battle. The legendary warlord's victories over Saxon invaders first appear in a 'history' written in the ninth-century north Wales. (Illustration by Georgie Gozem for BBC History Magazine)

The King Arthur delusion: a case of medieval fake news?. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.