The X-rated movies he’d seen by the age of ten included Deliverance, Taxi Driver and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – which he’d then discuss with his child psychologist

According to a new history of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I was chiefly to blame for the crisis of 1588

Despite the leader’s commitment to secularism and democracy, the persecution of Muslims and Dalits continued after independence

Giulia retreats to her isolated farmhouse to avoid bombardment in Turin, and grows increasingly attached to the partisan couple she shelters

The former Lord Chief Justice confesses that some of his liberal ideas didn’t turn out so well in practice

Hettie Judah describes how its various owners were plagued by bankruptcy, divorce, suicide, madness – and savaging by wild dogs

Steam trains, historic monuments and the family grocer were replaced by motorways, tower blocks and supermarkets. But at least there was humaner legislation

Unfairly dismissed as hucksters and fishwives, itinerant traders drove the capital’s expansion for centuries, says Charlie Taverner

Guy Shrubsole laments that the temperate rainforest that once covered a fifth of Britain has now shrunk to pitiful fragments on its western fringe

How long can a fugitive avoid detection after holing up in a city ‘big enough to be anonymous in’?

David Lloyd Dusenbury finds Jesus a ‘philosophically intriguing’ figure – and much bigger than a ‘mere’ revolutionary