Social history

"As a patron of crusading, St George easily became the quintessential knight," says Jonathan Good. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

St George’s Day: 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about England’s patron saint

Attempted assassination of Queen Victoria (1819-1901). On the evening of Wednesday 10 June 1840 Victoria and Prince Albert were travelling in a carriage along Constitution Hill near Buckingham Palace, London, when Edward Oxford fired a pistol at the Queen

The man who tried to assassinate Queen Victoria

An illustration from 1883 shows the phrenology chart of the skull

The Victorian phrenology craze

Anita Anand, photographed in London. "My grandfather was in Amritsar on the day of the massacre. This story has been woven into my DNA," she says. (Photography by Alastair Levy)

Books interview with Anita Anand: “Singh hoped that he would be the catalyst for a revolution”

A late 19th or early 20th-century painting entitled 'Mother and Child'. As fertility rates fell, sentimental idealisations of mothers and babies developed. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

The motherhood revolution: how the great fertility decline affected the lives of women

A protester in a headlock, Southall, April 1979, when a member of the Anti-Nazi League died after being struck on the head. (Images by Getty Images)

The Library 1979: Britain in meltdown

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Thatcher holds up two shopping bags to show how much less a pound would buy due to inflation under Labour. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Are we still living in Thatcher’s Britain?

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A souvenir for a burlesque adaptation of the classic opera 'Carmen' at the Gaiety Theatre, 1890. (Image by Bridgeman)

The Library Victorian burlesque: cheap thrills for the chattering classes

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4 revelations about the Titanic disaster

A portrait of three of the children of Henry VII: Prince Henry; Arthur Prince of Wales and Princess Margaret. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Royal sibling rivalry: Henry VIII, Richard III and other monarchs whose fate was determined by their brothers and sisters

Gerald Heard had a peculiar idea that the UFOs then being sighted all across the globe, as such as this ‘sighting’ in Sicily, were piloted not by humanoid ETs, as you may have presumed, but by alien super-bees from Mars. (Photo by Bettmann/Getty Images)

6 of history’s strangest ever theories about outer space

Marble bust of Emperor Caligula. (DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images)

The 8 bloodiest Roman emperors in history

Old Crofters Cottage, near Broadford, looking North, Isle of Skye, Scotland. (Photo by Getty Images)

The Scottish Clearances

Making a splash: Diana relishes taking her sons on a water ride at the Thorpe Park theme park in 1993. William has since recalled how his mother loved "laughter and fun". (Photo by Getty Images)

Princess Diana: a mother who ripped up the rule book