The men who tried to kill a queen

“There must have been a conspiracy,” says the novelist William Boyd, after describing John F Kennedy’s assassination to me. He cites the usual clues—the film shot by Abraham Zapruder, the entry wounds

Alice Loxton EleanorA 200-mile walk in search of England’slost queen352pp. Pan Macmillan. £22. Many are commemorated in stone, but few so grandly as Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290). Following her unexpec

A lovely lady, a peaceful street… and a chilling discovery

12 FEBRUARY

The sudden burst of gunshots shattered the relative calm of Lisbon’s Praça do Comércio, a beautiful plaza facing the Portuguese city’s harbour. King Carlos I, slumped in his open carriage, barely had

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me