On 16 May 1968, Ivy Hodge got up to make an early morning cuppa. She lived alone at flat 90 on the eighteenth floor of Ronan Point, a brand-new tower block built for Newham Council at Canning Town in the east London Docklands.

Before he ever thought of designing a building, Sir John Vanbrugh was a successful playwright – a man of the theatre through and through. He personifies Restoration drama. His plays are racy, subversive, witty, fast and furious.

On 24 October 2019, the body of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain until his death in 1975, was moved from one grave, near Madrid, to another site not far away. This act was accompanied by both celebrations and protests.

It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly.

A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict.

Between 1910 and 1960,” Melanie McDonagh observes, “well over half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics.” Most of them never set down their reasons, leaving the historical record to be dominated by the literary folk who wrote about it all the time:…

This offers the extraordinary story of a duke who had sex with a 17-year-old girl the day after they were first introduced. She was the second daughter of a former king of England, by then the world’s most powerful man, Philip II of Spain.

Stories of his famous grandfather’s war with the elements at the notorious Bell Rock enthralled Robert Louis Stevenson as a child. As a student at the Edinburgh Academy, and later the University, he was intended for the family business of lighthouse and harbour engineers.

Lynda Nead opens British Blonde with the cover of the Beatles album Sgt Pepper (1967). In the top left-hand corner of the collaged celebrities is the head of Mae West, from which you can draw a diagonal line that passes through the face of Marilyn Monroe, peeping out from the centre of the crowd, then comes to rest on the voluptuous full-length figure of Diana Dors, often known as “the British Marilyn”.

On a damp Derbyshire day in 1771, Richard Arkwright watched the world’s first water-powered mill begin to turn, setting in motion a force that would remake the world.