General Modern

Premium

Illustration by Jonty Clark.

Ye olde travel guide: Moscow 1937 . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Nuclear bomb test. (OFF/AFP/Getty Images)

How Britain got the bomb

Premium

An illustration titled ‘The petition for abolishing the slave trade’, from Amelia Opie’s ’The Black Man's Lament; or How to Make Sugar’, London, 1826. “Come, listen to my plaintive ditty,/Ye tender hearts, and children dear!/And, should it move your souls to pity,/Oh! try to end the griefs you hear.” (Photo by Photo 12/UIG via Getty Images)

9 key places connected to the abolition of the British slave trade . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Sebastian Coe, a track and field athlete, winning the 1,500 metres gold at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

Moscow 1980: going to the games

NEAM-VulcanRupert-Matthews_web-873f01f

North East Aircraft Museum, Sunderland

The charge of the Scots Greys at the battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815, was immortalised in this famous painting of 1881 by Lady Elizabeth Butler (1846-1933). (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Fighting Scots

Members of the royal family on board the royal barge 'Spirit of Chartwell'. (Rota/Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)

The Library The Thames triumphant: royal parties on London’s grandest street

Two medieval men thresh a sheaf of wheat in this 14th century illustration. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Michael Wood on the history of you and me

An American privateer is shown repelling a British attack during the War of 1812. Despite some notable successes, the British regarded the entire conflict as a sideshow and quickly forgot it. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)

When Washington burned

the-Plantation-Of-Ulster-cafd6b7

The Plantation of Ulster: The British Colonisation of the North of Ireland in the 17th Century

3D2B9713_web-fc3eefc

Porthcumo Telegraph Museum, Cornwall

CIMG0005_cmyk-0316bf7

The Minack Theatre, Cornwall

An 18th century village in Germany. Strict laws regulated the goods that each social class could buy. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Beware what you buy: the goods German citizens were forbidden to consume

Premium

podcast-logo_v4_31-21a6c69

King George VI and stories from Africa . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

A c15th-century vellum shows the Squire from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. For Adam Nicolson, the essence of the gentry was “government-through-networking”. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

Stories of the gentry