Laurence Earle

When the painter Stanley Spencer unveiled his masterpiece, 'The Resurrection, Cookham' (1924-27), The Times called it “the most important picture by any English artist in the present century”. In this famous, dreamlike composition, now one of the highlights at Tate Britain, Spencer imagines biblical figures rising up from the dead in…

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown is the towering genius of English garden architecture. Born in Northumberland in c.1715-16, this low-born son of a land agent and a chambermaid would go on to design groundbreaking naturalistic schemes of enduring beauty and enormous sophistication for many of the country's grandest country houses – from…

All eyes were on Tokyo this summer, as the world's most populous metropolitan area (home to an astonishing 37 million people) finally played host to the postponed 2020 Olympic Games. With its gleaming skyscrapers and ultramodern stadia, the Japanese capital made a suitably impressive backdrop for the planet's biggest sporting…

For centuries, the work of archaeologists has allowed us to piece together a picture of the past, and to understand our ancestors' place in the universe. Without it, we would not know what life was like in Pompeii, or how the Ancient Egyptians buried their dead, or what role the…

The Defence of Rorke's Drift remains one of the most celebrated engagements in UK military history. On the night of 22 January 1879, a force of just over 150 British and colonial troops held off an estimated 3-4,000 Zulu warriors during more than 12 hours of bitter, hand-to-hand fighting that…

He inherited the kingdom of Macedonia (in modern-day Greece) at the age of 20. By the time of his death, just 13 years later, he had created an empire that covered two million square miles – stretching across three continents, from the Danube and the Nile to the Himalayas –…

It was not, perhaps, our finest hour. On 21 July, UNESCO announced that its World Heritage Committee had voted to remove Liverpool from its List of World Heritage Sites, making Britain only the third country ever to suffer such an indignity. To make matters worse, the UN-backed agency warned that…

With her high cheekbones and long neck, she has been described as the 'world's first supermodel'. When her portrait bust went on display in 1923, she was hailed as an icon of timeless femininity. Since then, Nefertiti has been admired by everyone from Hitler to Beyoncé, and has provided inspiration…

Fifty miles south of Sicily, the tiny, densely populated island of Malta sits at the epicentre of Mediterranean history. Perched midway between Europe and Africa, it has long been a cultural crossroads, and its strategic importance has been recognised by a complicated succession of foreign rulers – including the Phoenicians,…

Tragically, massacres have been a regular feature of human conflict – and locations as varied as Amritsar and Srebrenica, Rwanda and Guatemala, Malmedy and My Lai have all earned their places in the annals of infamy. But while examples of indiscriminate mass killing may sadly be relatively commonplace, each has…