British royal bastards

Many birds have fabulous plumage to attract mates or send warning messages. Some of the colours in their feathers are produced by microscopic structures on the feather surface that absorb and reflect

After spending over a decade mapping our Milky Way, the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite is now being put into retirement. The spacecraft has almost depleted its reserves of the cold nitrogen ga

Alfred and Bede. These are the two figures who tower over the first half-millennium of the history of Anglo-Saxon England. There’s a reason for that, of course: they wrote this history. The Venerable

I once met a man who claimed he saw a huge black panther (circa 1990) near his farmhouse in Scotland. It had a pheasant in its mouth. He ran to get his shotgun but the creature had vanished. I knew th

One day late in 1939, a small article appeared in our daily newspaper. It was submitted by the government and was an appeal for British women to knit socks for men in the army, which was unable to obt

KATHERINE COBB is a member of AGRA based in Somerset JAYNE SHRIMPTON is a professional dress historian and portrait specialist ROGER KERSHAW is migration records specialist at The National Archives ST