Social history

Queen Elizabeth II driving her children Prince Charles and Princess Anne at Windsor, 1957. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

Why do Brits drive on the left-hand side of the road? Plus 4 other facts about the history of driving in Britain

Bemused families in Narodychi, Ukraine watch neighbours preparing to leave home shortly after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, just 50 miles (80km) to the east. The Soviet state proposed to re-house rural inhabitants in badly affected districts, but many preferred to stay despite (or perhaps unaware of the danger of) the high radiation detected by Geiger counters. (Photo by Igor Kostin/Sygma via Getty Images)

Eyewitness account: the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster

British spy writer Ian Fleming at his home, Goldeneye, in Jamaica. (Photo by Harry Benson/Express Newspapers/Getty Images)

The man behind James Bond

"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

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

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)

The Library Are we still living in Thatcher’s Britain?

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