Helen Castor is author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane) ...

At about nine o'clock on the night of November 30th, 1718, as Charles XII was inspecting sapping operations from a forward trench before the Norwegian fortress of Fredrickshall, a bullet travelling at ...

Peter the Great’s decision to join the Great Northern War when he did appeared to be a catastrophic mistake. Like many of his predecessors, the Tsar was determined to gain access to the Baltic. His ...

Nile Green is Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA and author of Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah (W.W. Norton) In the mid-1500s, the ...