From voyages to battles, gods to monsters, heroics to cowardice, the Viking sagas explore all of these themes in magnificent detail

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

Europe’s frozen northeast became a new sacred frontier of holy war, forced conversion and occupation against Europe’s last pagans

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

With emerald hills here and sinuous rivers there, a Yorkshire farmer’s years spent surveying the land on horseback resulted in a lavish and surprisingly accurate atlas of Elizabeth I’s Britain, says Ben Lerwill

“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