May 1849 wagner the revolutionary flees dresden to avoid arrest

In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bott

In her 2001 book about the city, travel writer Jan Morris famously described Trieste as ‘the meaning of nowhere’ – a place left behind by history and by its political geography. A quarter of a century

In 1984, a truncated version of Maurice Ravel’s orchestral piece Boléro was used to accompany a routine by British ice-dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics. The p

I n 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the w

The dance is the ‘vertical expression of horizontal desire’ and Johann Strauss II, whose bicentenary it is this year, was the composer most responsible for its explosion in popularity. Henrietta Bredin reports

Three months after German forces captured Fort Douaumont in February 1916 (see issue 1 of Iron Cross) a calamity befell the occupiers, predominantly comprising troops from the Prussian Brandenburg reg