the Ottoman empire

Flirting in 15th-century Florence

20 January 2024 9:00 am

In his history of male-male sexual relations, Noel Malcolm describes how a man in Renaissance Italy would seduce a boy in the street by seizing his hat and holding it ransom

Downhill all the way: the decline of the British Empire after 1923

13 January 2024 9:00 am

Matthew Parker gives us snapshots of Britain’s sprawling dominions in September 1923, showing both governors and governed increasingly questioning the purpose of the empire

Truly magnificent: the splendour of Suleiman I

26 February 2022 9:00 am

Suleiman I richly deserved his epithet, as this vivid account of his early years illustrates, says Jason Burke

British officers in a modern motor car drive against the current of horsemen of the Arab army entering Damascus on 1 October 1918. Anglo-Arab policies were equally at cross purposes following the fall of the city

The Ottoman empire: the last great casualty of the first world war

2 May 2015 9:00 am

In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…

An Armenian orphan in 1915. Hundreds of thousands of Christian women and children who survived the genocide suffered forced conversion to Islam

At last: a calm, definitive account of the Armenian genocide

18 April 2015 9:00 am

The atrocities suffered by an estimated one million Armenians in 1915 have been largely ignored by historians and officially denied by the Turks. It’s a centenary we can’t afford to neglect, says Justin Marozzi

View of Baghdad in 1918

Baghdad's rise, fall – and rise again

31 May 2014 9:00 am

Ali A. Allawi on the fluctuating fortunes of Iraq’s fabled capital

Portrait of T.E. Lawrence by Augustus John

Lawrence of Arabia, meet Curt of Cairo

8 March 2014 9:00 am

How do you write a new book about T.E. Lawrence, especially when the man himself described his escapades, or a…