Crime and punishment - Getty Images

Crime and punishment

The murders at Rillington Place: postwar London's grisliest crimes.

A Victorian cult: inside the strange world of the Agapemone.

An 1872 illustration from the weekly newspaper Days’ Doings shows a shoplifter being apprehended (Photo by Look and Learn/Rosenberg Collection/Bridgeman Images)

Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld.

The school for girls imprisoned at Tothill Fields in the late 1850s. A dedicated schoolmistress was employed to teach that institution’s large female population; in other prisons, the matron took lessons. (Engraving from Chronicle, via Alamy)

Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools.

Lord Lucan: the vanishing earl.

“Impaled on a stake and left to die”: crime, punishment and law enforcement in ancient Egypt.

Police chase demonstrators during the 1936 battle of Cable Street

When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained

Victorian women detectives.

English prime minister Spencer Perceval being assassinated by bankrupt businessman John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons

Why was Spencer Perceval assassinated? Inside the killing of a Georgian prime minister

Video podcastThe Iranian embassy siege: an SAS hostage drama in London.

Hand-coloured engraving of someone being tortured on the wheel.

Stretched, crushed and impaled10 shocking torture methods from medieval history

Medieval torture: everything you wanted to know.

Roman soldiers on the detail of Trajan's Column

Why decimation was the most unfair punishment in the Roman Army

Montage of famous assassinations, including Gandhi and JFK.

General History

50 assassinations that changed the world

A crusader army led by French king Louis IX clashes with Ayyubid forces at Mansurah in 1250. Two centuries of warfare across the Middle East “drew a torrent of often dangerous young men into the region”, writes Steve Tibble. (Photo by Getty Images)

Crusader criminals: why medieval knights went rogue in the Holy Land.

Kavita Puri's hidden histories: how Gurdip Singh Chaggar's murder in 1976 sparked a youth movement.

Priest's Hole, formerly a medieval sewer, beneath the kitchen in Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire.

A perilous game of hide and seekThe history of priest holes and hunters

Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell.

Illustration shows force-feeding of suffragettes

What was the Cat and Mouse Act? The reason why suffragettes were force-fed

Video podcastVictorian crime and punishment: everything you wanted to know.

Victorian crime and punishment: everything you wanted to know.

A 21st-century Holocaust trial.

A police mugshot of Frank Lee Morris

The shocking Alcatraz escape of 11 June 1962

Alcatraz history: from pelican paradise to prolific prison

Photographs of some of the victims of the 1944 Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane

Second World War

Oradour-sur-Glane massacre: the brutal SS atrocity that still haunts France

From murderous motivations to chivalrous reputationsThe fascinating history of highwaymen.

Inside a Jim Crow asylum.

Tituba of Salem, in a 19th-century illustration (Photo by The Granger Collection/Alamy)

General Early Modern

5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the history of witchcraft.

Anne Boleyn pays Mark Smeaton a final visit in Gaetano Donizetti's opera Anna Bolena

He was the court musician who condemned Anne Boleyn: but was Mark Smeaton telling the truth?

OJ Simpson: the trial that gripped the world.