In 1964, two physicists working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey were puzzling over the persistent static that plagued the signals picked up by a massive receiver built to detect radio waves bouncing off satellites.

Nobody likes a convert. For believers, the word carries connotations of zealotry, an implicit accusation of slackness in those with established beliefs. To the unconverted, it represents a baffling abandonment, a loss of plot and implied disapproval of unconverted friends.

Constructed to be a statement of French military strength, the Maginot Line has come to be seen instead as solid evidence of a defensive, doomed-to-defeat attitude, duly exploited by the Blitzkrieg in the summer of 1940.

Preaching​ before Edward VI and his council in June 1548, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, reflected that ‘in my time hath come many alterations.’ Gardiner was referring to the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the iconoclastic fervour of Edward’s reign, each of which represented a ‘great alteration’ of policy and sentiment.

In his 2002 memoir Interesting Times, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm offers a succinct definition of the 1900s. “Nothing is more characteristic of that century,” he notes, “than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the 20th century: political passion’.”

The subtitle of Walter Reid’s biography of James Ramsay MacDonald refers to ‘the extraordinary rise and tragic fall’ of Labour’s first prime minister. The rise was not especially extraordinary. In the first decades of the 20th century several people from relatively humble backgrounds – David Lloyd George and John Burns from outside MacDonald’s party, and Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson (to give just two examples) from within it – reached the top or very near the top of British politics.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine enters its fifth year, the economy that sustains it has been transformed in ways that will be difficult—perhaps impossible—to reverse without another crisis.

Around 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. His physical exit from this world was swift, yet in cultural terms the Nazi dictator has taken an extraordinarily long time to die.

I was once introduced at the Edinburgh book festival by a man holding his nose, intoning a string of notes and wriggling his fingers around. He was a journalist and critic, a sophisticated and knowledgeable writer and a Scot. What was he doing?

Lithuania was the last major pagan principality in Europe, worshipping its own array of gods until Grand Duke Jogaila converted to Roman Catholicism in 1386 to marry a twelve-year-old Polish princess and become king of Poland.