Classical Greek and modern ideas of beauty

A quest to find Horace Walpole’s missing Ottoman dagger unveiled a story of 16th-century diplomacy, Victorian theatre and a notorious heist

Capturing the immediacy of fighting and the writhing bodies of soldiers, as well as keeping narrative clarity, proved enormously difficult for painters depicting battles before the advent of photography. Michael Hall reveals how they rose to the challenge

What the West owes to the ancient world

A History of England in 25 Poems: Treasures ...

All serious scholarship on ancient Sparta has to be conducted within the penumbra of the ‘mirage Spartiate’, a French term coined in 1933 to describe the problem posed by idealised accounts of Sparta.