Capturing the immediacy of fighting and the writhing bodies of soldiers, as well as keeping narrative clarity, proved enormously difficult for painters depicting battles before the advent of photography. Michael Hall reveals how they rose to the challenge

Uncover the all-conquering Hun king whose nomadic horde terrorised Rome

BBC Two and BBC iPlayer Late November TBC More than a quarter of the world’s countries are former British colonies. The British Empire was one of the greatest powers the world has ever known, and its

All serious scholarship on ancient Sparta has to be conducted within the penumbra of the ‘mirage Spartiate’, a French term coined in 1933 to describe the problem posed by idealised accounts of Sparta.

Our pick of the latest military history books

The most celebrated of all ancient Romans almost met a watery end before he’d made his big splash in the vast ocean of history. In 75 BC, Julius Caesar – then in his mid-20s and yet to establish himse