Weird and wonderful history

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector

Royalists, beards and cowardice: are these the strangest taxes in history?

Edvard Munch's painting 'Love and Pain'

The Vampyre stirs: 200 years of vampire entertainment

A poster for Terence Fisher's 1958 horror 'Dracula'

From Dracula to The Historian: 5 gothic novels that reflected the anxieties of their age

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Fresco by Memmo di Filippuccio, Palazzo Comunale, San Gimignano/Tuscany (Photo by Alamy)

The filthy Middle Ages? . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Rotten boroughs cartoon

9 general election curiosities through history

Tourists at Stonehenge

Stonehenge: a prehistoric tourist trap

Simon the cat

10 top cats in history

Being invited to become a 'guest' of the Tower of London in medieval England meant, more often than not, that you would soon be food for the crows. (Image by Getty Images/RM Creative)

10 historical haunted sites across Britain

In 1733, as part of a plot to blow up a Protestant church, a group of Catholics claimed they were being terrorised by a poltergeist… or so the story went. (Illustration by Ben Jones for BBC History Magazine)

5 Georgian ghost hoaxes

This 1867 magazine illustration shows a group of children preparing for Halloween. (Photo by American Stock/Getty Images)

The origins of Halloween: tricks, treats and cobbled streets

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Cariad Lloyd, Suzannah Lipscomb and Greg Jenner

“A history podcast for people who don’t like history”: Greg Jenner on his new podcast You’re Dead To Me . This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

The Lockheed U-2 shares little in common with a flying saucer. (Image by Alamy)

Q&A How did Area 51 become associated with aliens?

A photo which was believed to be of the Loch Ness Monster

The quest for the Loch Ness Monster

Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico's left-wing president who in 1940 legalised drugs. (Photo by Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The year Mexico legalised drugs

Medieval trepanning

General prehistory

Q&A What is trepanning?