The charge of the light, battle illustration

Military history

The wartime SAS and Hitler’s drug addiction

Reporting from war zones

The end game: Britain’s role in Afghanistan 1947–50

The Harrying of the North. Gouache on paper, by Patrick Nicolle (1907–95). Private collection. (© Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images)

Occupation, resistance, subjugation: the bloody aftermath of 1066

Q&A: If the battle of Hastings had never taken place, would British history have been any different?

The Norman Conquest

The battle of Stamford Bridge, 1066. (Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo)

1066 – how the Viking diversion cost Harold his throne

The London & North Western Railway locomotive Jeanie Deans picking up water at Bushey Troughs, 1899. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)

Europe’s century of peace and progress

Historical television and the battle of Flodden

Churchill's army: the wartime leader’s military track record examined

Cold War summits

The end of the First World War and the Duke of Wellington

Royal palaces of the Hundred Years’ War

The Suez crisis and the north of England

Soviet missiles in Red Square during the May Day Parade of 1962, the year the world came closest to nuclear war. (Photo by Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)

History explorer: the Cold War

The Cold War and the history of philosophy

British reserve troops waiting to move up to the forward area during the battle of the Somme, France, 1916. Photograph from the Daily Herald Archive. (Photo by Daily Herald Archive/SSPL/Getty Images)

The Somme: was it really a monstrous failure?

Events leading up to the battle of Hastings, and the conflict itself, are depicted in the Bayeux tapestry, a 68-metre-long embroidered frieze probably made within 20 years of the Conquest. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

Bayeux unravelled: the scenes behind the threads

Monument to the Spanish Civil War (Dreamstime)

Spain’s very international civil war

British soldiers arrive to take part in the battle of France, 1940. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

Books interview with Daniel Todman: "Everything that happened in 1940 isn't somehow down to Winston Churchill"

Battle of the Somme special

Operation Barbarossa

Tudor monarchs and a medieval civil war

A detail of the decorative carving on the side of the Oseberg cart c850 AD. A woman with streaming hair apparently restrains a man’s sword arm as he strikes at a horseman accompanied by a dog. Below is a frieze of intertwined serpentine beasts. (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Viking women: raiders, traders and settlers

The battle of Jutland and 1950s domestic dangers

Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in Burma, March 1944. (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

When Britain tamed ‘superman’

Members of Assassins cult kill Conrad I of Jerusalem

Edmund II - better known as Edmund Ironside - shown in a 14th-century manuscript. (Photo by Wikimedia Commons)

Edmund Ironside: Anglo-Saxon warrior king

A group of five marble busts of typical early Roman citizens. The empire expanded by absorbing the peoples it defeated, giving rights and obligations to former outsiders. (Photo by Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Mary Beard on why Rome ruled the world

Monopoly maps: the history of MI9’s secret Second World War escape programme