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As the world’s best athletes congregate in Tokyo for the 29th Summer Games, David Goldblatt answers your questions on the history of the Olympics. (Image from Getty Images)

Olympic history: everything you wanted to know . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

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Michael Burleigh discusses some of history’s key political killings, from Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln. (Image from Getty Images)

How assassinations have changed history . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Jesse Owens sprinting on a track at the Berlin Olympics.

A history of unsporting conduct at the Olympics

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Elinor Cleghorn The History of Unwell Women . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Robespierre is guillotined on 28 July 1794. Had he died two years earlier, his name would now be associated with liberty and equality, argues Marisa Linton. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

Robespierre: man of terror

Kissing the Blarney Stone: a women hangs over the precipice with the aid of a friend as she attempts the feat at Blarney Castle in 1935

What is the Blarney Stone, where did it come from and why do people kiss it?

The execution of Louis XVI in the Place de la Revolution

What is a revolution?

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Fern Riddell

Contraception, consent & erotic connection: sex through history . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

American billionaire Howard Hughes (shown here in a car in 1947) went from a visionary filmmaker to a germ-obsessed recluse, dying in 1976. (Photo by Getty Images)

“His flesh had rotted, and his bed was full of worms”: 5 of history’s most eccentric hermits

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Everything you wanted to know about Canadian history

Canadian history: everything you wanted to know . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare

“Make love not midnight snacks”: a social history of slimming clubs

On the evening of 13 March thousands of people in Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding areas see a triangular formation of lights drifting above the city. Fife Symington, the governor of Arizona at the time, was one of the witnesses and he described the UFO as “otherworldly”. This image shows something similar to what was reported at the time. (Photo by Alamy)

UFO history 10 top sightings and a timeline

A UFO photographed in New Mexico by a government employee. The image was released by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization after careful study. It is unknown what the image shows.(Photo by Getty Images)

How UFOs conquered the world – without firing a shot

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Victorian London prison, Newgate. Prisoners in the exercise yard. Engraving by Gustave Doré, 1872 (Photo by Getty Images)

British prisons: everything you wanted to know . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Prisoners exercise and play sport in the courtyard of the Fleet Prison, circa 1872

Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain