Illustration of a Medieval Scribe

Literature

What Norse poetry reveals about the Viking age.

An 1812 cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson depicts highwaymen in action in the days when travellers made for easy pickings for criminals (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Murder and mayhem in Georgian Britain: the scandalous work of Johnson's General History.

Marriage, Middlemarch & male pseudonyms: George Eliot’s unconventional life.

Oscar Wilde on trial.

The book that transformed medieval England.

Portrayal of the Charge of the Light Brigade

The Charge of the Light BrigadeWho blundered in the Valley of Death?

Lord Byron

Everything you wanted to know about the Romantics

The Romantics: everything you wanted to know.

Was Shakespeare a snob?.

Jane Austen’s England: everything you wanted to know.

Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll: maker of wonderlands

A portrait of Vlad the Impaler, aka Vlad II, whose bloodlust and cruelty was said to have inspired the most famous vampire of literature

The real Dracula? The bloodthirsty life of Vlad the Impaler

The characters Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, from Charles Dickens's work 'A Christmas Carol'

Did Charles Dickens invent Christmas as we know it today?

Books of the year 2022.

Spiritualism, fairies, and Arthur Conan-Doyle.

Sci-fi history: everything you wanted to know.

Chaucer’s disputed legacy: new discoveries.

Ian McEwan on writing historical novels.

British writer Hilary Mantel photographed at home

Hilary Mantel on the secrets of successful historical fiction.

Dangerous ideas & scandalous lives: Germany’s first Romantics.

Author, adventurer, archaeologist: Agatha Christie’s action-packed life.

Writer JRR Tolkien smokes a pipe

JRR TolkienThe making of Middle Earth

What to read nextThe latest history books reviewed

First World War poets: everything you wanted to know.

Gone with the Wind: how a 1936 novel explains modern America.

Stalin’s library: inside the mind of a dictator.

Powerful pages: the beguiling history of books.

A Maria Spilsbury painting of a group sat at a drawing room table

Regency romance and a real-life Anne Elliot.

Nisha Katona and Samuel Pepys

History heroNisha Katona chooses Samuel Pepys (1633–1703).

Book cover of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four: to the future or to the past?.