WATCHING THE RECENT SPECTACLE OF THOSE latter-day emperors President Xi of China and India’s Narendra Modi hugging each other at the summit in Tianjin, my mind cast back to an earlier image of a pan-A

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

How the Qin forged a great power from the fragments of the Warring States

Danny Bird Your book opens with the story of a woman named Solitude on Guadaloupe. Why did you choose to start with her and what can she tell us about the wider history of resistance among enslaved pe

I REMEMBER LOOKING IN THE BBC ARCHIVES for stories of the first arrivals of South Asians in the postwar years, and being surprised at how little programming had been made documenting the experiences o

I greatly enjoyed your interview with Alice Roberts about her new book Domination, (Books Interview, September), and its argument that the church was essentially Rome rebadged, with its structures and