Leading historians share the texts that have inspired and informed their work

The grisly fate of more than 16,000 soldiers and civilians during the First Anglo-Afghan War serves as a timeless lesson in hubris and bad leadership

The communist conquest of China in 1949 was one of the most consequential – and surprising – geopolitical events of the 20th century. It shifted the world’s most populous country from the western to t

By spring 1941, the Afrika Korps was advancing across eastern Libya towards Egypt and the Suez Canal. But a dusty port town lay in their path

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

I was a teenager during the Second World War, although the term teenager was not in use in those days. You were just a lad. What’s more, one often left school and became a worker at age 14, as I did i