Laurence Earle

The obvious comparison, here in Britain, is with Hadrian’s Wall – the great Roman fortification that stretches for 73 miles across the country from coast to coast. Yet the Great Wall of Gorgan – built just a few hundred years later by the Sasanian dynasty, who ruled Persia (modern Iran)…

If the past is a foreign country – as the novelist L.P. Hartley famously suggested in the opening line to The Go-Between (1953) – then prehistory is surely a whole other world entirely. With little physical evidence often to guide us, and with no contemporary accounts to instruct us in…

The most important event in the history of the USA began with a disagreement – over the place of slavery in a democratic society. By the time it ended, more than 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers had given their lives – roughly equivalent to the number of Americans killed in…

It seems likely that Harold Godwinson was the first king to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, though there is no documentary evidence from the time to confirm this. As a result, that honour is accorded officially to Harold’s successor, William the Conqueror, whose coronation we know with certainty to have…

As consumers, we are well aware that scent sells. Supermarkets have for years been luring us in with delicious (if artificial) aromas of fresh coffee and newly baked baguettes, while cinema-owners’ profits have long been boosted by the wafting smell of popcorn. The commercial logic of such ‘scent marketing’ is…

These days, it sometimes seems hard to read a newspaper, or scan a news website, without coming across an article about the ‘new elites’ who run our world. Often this is in reference to the richest ‘1 percent’, who are said to have hoovered up most of the money, property,…

For almost 200 years, visitors to the British Museum have stood in awe in front of the statue known as the Younger Memnon – one of two colossal granite heads which originally flanked the entrance to the Ramesseum mortuary temple in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. Even before its…

There are, according to the heritage body Historic England, at least 37,000 shipwrecks strewn along the country’s coastline – a legacy of more than 6,000 years of maritime trade, exploration and warfare. Such a torturous proliferation offers a poignant reminder that a sailor’s life in British waters has always been…

As any Asterix fan will tell you, the siege of Alésia occupies a special place in the French psyche. The climactic action of Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul took place in September 52 BC – two years before the adventures described in Goscinny and Uderzo’s indomitable tales – and is…

It is understandable perhaps, here in Britain, that we have a somewhat partial understanding of Ancient Rome’s border defences – with most attention focused naturally on Hadrian’s Wall, the extraordinary fortified structure that is the largest Roman artefact anywhere in the world. But while Hadrian’s Wall is unique in many…

It began as an anticolonial struggle against the French, and ended as the Cold War’s bloodiest battleground. By the time the last US troops were withdrawn on 29 March 1973 – fifty years ago this month – it had cost the lives of around 58,000 Americans, and anywhere between 600,000…

He is, without doubt, the most quoted prime minister in British history. But even by his own standards, the speech that Winston Churchill made on 5 March 1946 stands out. Addressing an audience in Fulton, Missouri, he warned that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended over Europe (a reference to the…