Laurence Earle

A fascinating exhibition opening at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre this autumn shines new light on a remarkable group of ancient stone circles. Spread across 17 sites, and mostly dating from c.2500 to 300 BC, these extraordinary monuments served for centuries as the focus for ceremonies associated with solar alignments and the seasons, as well as with death and the afterlife. Such is their importance that these stone circles were even granted UNESCO World Heritage status last summer. Even so, they will be unknown to many here in Britain.

Underwater warfare came of age on 15 September 1914, when Germany’s U-21 became the first submarine to sink a ship with a self-propelled torpedo. The U-boat’s devastating surprise attack, off the Firth

With 130 ships, 2,431 guns, and 30,000 men, Philip II’s invasion force was, according to one English admiral, ‘the greatest and strongest combination that was ever gathered in all Christendom’. If it

It was, according to the ship’s captain, a ‘once in a 100-year phenomenon’. On 13 February 1997, the 944ft-long cargo vessel Tokio Express was en route from Rotterdam to New York when it was hit by a freak wave about 20 miles off Land’s End, causing it to tilt so violently that 62 lorry-sized containers were thrown into the ocean.

This year sees the marking of two significant anniversaries: the centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by the British archaeologist Howard Carter, in excavations funded by Lord Carnarvon; and the bicentenary

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that Chinese culture began with the Qin – the regional powerbrokers who in the 3rd-century BC conquered their warring rivals to become

According to the 12th-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, the famous stones that make up the Stonehenge monument were erected originally in Ireland, before being moved to their current, more familiar home on

Throughout history, writers and artists have used their imaginations to tell stories from former times. From The Iliad to A Tale of Two Cities, and from The Last Supper to the Sistine

History, as we know, has been driven by the complicated love affair between humans and booze. Writing in the fourth-century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato summed it up for many, when he

These days, the term ‘philhellenism’ (literally, the love of all things Greek) is perhaps most often associated with the Romantic poets and thinkers of the late 18th and 19th centuries – a