Sex and love

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor playing Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII in the 1963 film, Cleopatra. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

The 7 best couples in history

A cartoon depicting the Duke of Wellington

Georgian Britain: sex in high places

From The Library

Elizabeth I, shown in a portrait commemorating victory over the Armada. (Photo by: Photo 12/UIG via Getty Images)

7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Elizabeth I

Queen Victoria, c1860s. Victoria attended her son's wedding in March 1863 wearing full mourning dress – her husband, Prince Albert, had died some 15 months earlier. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Troublesome royal in-laws through history

c1540, a portrait of King Henry VIII. An engraving by T A Dean from a painting by Hans Holbein. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

5 things you (probably) didn’t know about Henry VIII

Queen Victoria with Prince Albert and their children in 1846. After a painting by F Winterhalter. Victoria’s husband Albert “carved out for the crown a moral kind of authority as the nation’s first and model family,” says Sarah Gristwood. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Retaining the royals: why has the British monarchy survived – and thrived?

Portrait of Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII, 1536. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)

Henry VIII’s six wives in a different light

From The Library

An engraving showing the story of the Three Living and the Three Dead

Inside the medieval mind

From The Library

Portrait of Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, from a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

11 facts about Catherine Howard

Wall painting from The House of the Faun, built during the 2nd century BC in the Roman city of Pompeii, depicting an erotic satyr and nymph. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

In bed with the Romans: a brief history of sex in Ancient Rome

Coca cola bottles from the 1990s

From Velcro to Viagra: 10 products that were invented by accident

While young ladies may have been daydreaming of handsome film stars such as Cary Grant, pictured here kissing the cheek of Ingrid Bergman in a publicity still for the 1946 film ‘Notorious’, agony aunts were keen to bring them back down to earth. (Photo by John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

How to be a man: tips from 1930s agony aunts

A Campaign for Homosexual Equality rally held in London’s Trafalgar Square in 1974. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 helped pave the way for activism such as this in the 1970s, says Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite. (Corbis via Getty Images)

The 1967 Sexual Offences Act: a landmark moment in the history of British homosexuality

A view of a calander showing the date, Friday the 13th. (Photo by William C. Shrout/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

10 historical superstitions we carry on today