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Culture

The Gothic: from Dracula to The Shining

How the Beatles were in tune with 60s Britain

School photo showing rows of children from a Manchester school

Did Britain really roar in the 1920s?

The Beatles pictured in 1969

The Beatles: 8 landmark moments that chart the changing face of sixties Britain

Three medieval carol singers, image dated 1911

Christmas carols: the history behind 9 festive favourites

Michael Wood on James Bond“Bond’s role grew out of proportion to Britain’s standing in the world”

A 14th-century illustration of a farmer leading a pack animal through the ice and snow

The surprisingly modern Middle Ages

Josiah Wedgwood: the radical father of English pottery

3 curious medieval ghost stories

Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare’s black Othello

Tourists at Stonehenge. We have no better idea today than 200 years ago what the people who erected these sarsens truly believed. (Getty Images)

Prehistoric religion: a pagan riddle we will never solve?

Adventures of a Victorian actor

This red-figure pottery depicts a story involving Helen of Troy. Greek tragedies posed their audiences an awkward question: what would you do if you were in a similar situation? Meanwhile, comedy gave satirists a channel through which to cut Athens' political heavies down to size. (DEA/G.NIMATALLAH/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Ancient Greek theatre and the Athenian identity

Adolf Hitler stands with his back to a statue of Discobolos, the Discus Thrower

The classics and racial hatred: how the far right hijacked the ancient world

Alex Von Tunzelmann“Debates about statues are often posed in simplistic primary colours”

The Statue of Liberty against a blue sky

Q&AWas the Statue of Liberty designed specifically for the United States?

Ornate water gardens of the ancient fortress of Sigiriya in Sri Lanka

From Nan Madol to Karakorum: 7 cities that history forgot

A plaque which decorated the palace of the Benin Obas, The Obas butchers sacrificing a cow, the most prestigious animal sacrifice

Benin: a kingdom cast in bronze, brought to ruin by Britain

A phantasmagoria by Belgian entertainer Etienne-Gaspard Robert, whose stage name was Etienne Robertson, 1797. (Photo by Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Phantasmagoria: creating the ‘ghosts’ of the Enlightenment

Early Medieval Britain: everything you wanted to know

Walter Scott: an engraving after a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence of the Scottish poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott

Walter Scott: the man who invented Scotland

History heroSteven Berkoff chooses Laurence Olivier (1907–89)

Modern Welsh history: everything you wanted to know

The slave trade: a family history

Tokyo Olympics 1964: Yoshinori Sakai prepares to light the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremony. Born on the day that the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, he was a symbol of Japan’s postwar reconstruction and peace

Tokyo Olympics 1964: the Games that defined Japan

The piano: a musical history

Bronwen Everill discusses the Benin Bronzes

The battle over the Benin Bronzes

Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle

Q&AWho wrote the French national anthem?

The Enlightenment: everything you wanted to know

A man digs a grave in Sarajevo for victims of the war in Bosnia, 1992

Yugoslavia: why shared Slavic identity couldn’t save an idealised nation from fracture and bloodshed