20th Century - Getty Images

20th Century

American novelist John Updike

My history hero: John Updike (1932-2009). This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

East End crime. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A woman looks at 'The Recognition of Philopoemen', c1609 by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens at the Museo del Prado, Madrid. (Photo by Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)

A beginner's guide to art history

Bowie’s Berlin: the city that shaped a 1970s masterpiece

Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin stands beside an American flag, soon after landing on the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission. (Photo by NASA/Liaison)

OpinionWas the Moon landing really a great leap for mankind?

Field Marshal Bill Slim

My history hero: Field Marshal Bill Slim (1891-1970). This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Winston Churchill leaves a cabinet meeting

Churchill’s days of destiny

1922 in pictures: nationalists, navies, mountains and modernism

Q&A: When were the first film trailers shown?

In pictures: a history of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

Illustration by Lynn Hatzius

Britain’s Bonnie and Clyde

The ruins of the Canadian port of Halifax in the wake of the explosion in December 1917. Almost 2,000 people were killed and 9,000 injured when two ships collided at the height of the First World War. (Photo by Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images)

Catastrophe in Canada

The Carbonniere Tower

My favourite place: the Camargue, France

Blitz

Second World War

The cruel cost of the Blitz: how did everyday Britons rebuild their lives?

General Edmund Allenby walks into Jerusalem on 11 December 1917

The Balfour Declaration: Britain’s unholy mess

Violeta Parra and the birth of ‘New Song’

Edward, Prince of Wales, in the rear seat of a Bristol F.2B Fighter with Captain WG Barker of No. 139 Squadron during his flight in 1918, while on a visit to the Italian Front. (Crown Copyright/Air Historical Branch image H1608)

Royal flying

Children at the Berlin Wall on Sebastianstrasse, Berlin - Kreuzberg - in around 1964. (Photo by Lehnartz/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

The secret history of the Berlin Wall

Striking workers carry banners through the streets of Petrograd (St Petersburg) at the start of the February Revolution that brought the fall of the Russian monarchy the next month. (Getty Images)

Russia’s revolutions: How 1917 shaped a century

Gertrude Bell. (Photo by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

My history hero: Gertrude Bell (1868–1926). This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Amber Fort, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. (Getty Images)

My favourite place: Jaipur, India

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, depicted in an undated Communist poster. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The red dawn: the October Revolution

The death of Stalin. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

British prime minister Clement Attlee reading a document in his office, 27 July 1946. (Photo by Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Attlee’s secret war with Stalin

Soviet submarines. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

When the world didn’t end. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The May 1940 War Cabinet Crisis: Churchill’s darkest hour?

The Ukrainian famine. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

West Indian immigrants arrive at Victoria Station, London, following their journey from Southampton Docks. Originally published in ‘Picture Post’, 1956. (Photo by Haywood Magee/Getty Images)

Clair Wills on immigrants. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A c1880 advertisement poster for Coca-Cola. The name derived from its extracts of coca leaves and kola nuts – the former did contain small amounts of cocaine. (Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images)

Q&ADid the original Coca-Cola drink really contain cocaine?

A boy sitting on a rock ledge above a refugee camp, October 1947. (Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

The bloody road to partition: 8 landmark moments in the turbulent story