According to a new history of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth I was chiefly to blame for the crisis of 1588

Despite the leader’s commitment to secularism and democracy, the persecution of Muslims and Dalits continued after independence

Giulia retreats to her isolated farmhouse to avoid bombardment in Turin, and grows increasingly attached to the partisan couple she shelters

The former Lord Chief Justice confesses that some of his liberal ideas didn’t turn out so well in practice

Hettie Judah describes how its various owners were plagued by bankruptcy, divorce, suicide, madness – and savaging by wild dogs

Steam trains, historic monuments and the family grocer were replaced by motorways, tower blocks and supermarkets. But at least there was humaner legislation

Unfairly dismissed as hucksters and fishwives, itinerant traders drove the capital’s expansion for centuries, says Charlie Taverner

Guy Shrubsole laments that the temperate rainforest that once covered a fifth of Britain has now shrunk to pitiful fragments on its western fringe

How long can a fugitive avoid detection after holing up in a city ‘big enough to be anonymous in’?

David Lloyd Dusenbury finds Jesus a ‘philosophically intriguing’ figure – and much bigger than a ‘mere’ revolutionary

For centuries, grammarians considered it vulgar and warned against using it too freely – but Jane Austen saw the point of it, says Florence Hazrat

Kate Andersen Brower has had access to the vast, unpublished archive of Hollywood’s queen - famed for her beauty, diamonds and unhappy marriages

A downcast cellist discovers that his music cures sick mice and rabbits in one of many tales featuring talking animals in eerie, folkloric landscapes

Separated from her husband, Constance trains herself to be ‘indestructible’ while awaiting a ruling over custody of their son

James Runcie’s harrowing account of his wife’s last days during lockdown includes blackly comic descriptions of trying to follow nursing instructions on YouTube

Most of the 66 songs he discusses in a collection of meditative essays date from the late 1940s to the advent of punk – a movement that evidently passed him by

Balanchine described himself as ‘a cloud in trousers’ – and Jennifer Homans perfectly captures the earthly man and his ethereal gift

Authoritarian regimes that have emerged out of violent social revolutions have survived on average three times as long as their non-revolutionary counterparts

Ever since the societas publicanorum, corporations have been linked with the common good, carrying out projects for which the state is ill-equipped