Literature

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie in profile: facts about her life

Edvard Munch's painting 'Love and Pain'

The Vampyre stirs: 200 years of vampire entertainment

American actresses Frances Dee, Jean Parker, Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Bennett playing the March girls in George Cukor's film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women', 1933. (Photo by RKO Pictures/Courtesy of Getty Images)

“Fresh and full of soul”: the history of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women

A poster for Terence Fisher's 1958 horror 'Dracula'

From Dracula to The Historian: 5 gothic novels that reflected the anxieties of their age

Bill Nighy and Olivia Cooke in 'The Limehouse Golem'.

The real history behind Victorian thriller ‘The Limehouse Golem’

Colour portrait of Jane Austen

8 things you (probably) didn’t know about Jane Austen

The characters Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, from Charles Dickens's work 'A Christmas Carol'. (Photo by Alamy/Mary Evans)

Did Charles Dickens invent Christmas as we know it today?

(Illustration by Laurie Avon for BBC History Magazine)

37 books for history lovers: BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year 2019

The figure of Santa Claus is the very embodiment of the modern American secular Christmas. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)

How America captured Christmas

British mystery writer Agatha Christie, c1926. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie

Knole, a house on an epic scale that's now run by the National Trust.

Explore Knowle: the grandest of family homes

British writer Roald Dahl

Second World War

11 things you might not know about Roald Dahl

Maoism

Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History wins 2019 Cundill History Prize

The War of the Worlds. (Photo by BBC/© Mammoth Screen)

Days of future past: how the new BBC TV series The War of the Worlds reinvented the sci-fi classic

Actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was personally invited by Oscar Wilde to play the title role in the upcoming London premiere of his play, 'Salomé'.

6 of London theatre’s most notable historical scandals