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Eight hundred and fifty years ago, on 4 December 1154, Nicholas Breakspear (d. 1159) became the only Englishman to occupy the throne of St Peter when he was elected pope in succession to Anastasius IV, taking the name Adrian IV. A man of relatively humble background, who had probably been born in or near ...

Deborah, Lady Moody, was born in the mid-1580s. Her father, Walter Dunch, was a lawyer and sometime member of parliament for Dunwich in Suffolk. In 1606 she married a Wiltshire landowner, Henry Moody; together they had at least two children. About 1639, in middle age, and perhaps in protest at ...

In 2005, some seventy-seven years after women were granted the vote on the same basis as men, and eighty-seven years after the first woman was elected to the Westminster parliament, women comprise 18 per cent of MPs, and 28 per cent of local councillors (...

Berwick upon Tweed is today an English town, but it is the only English town which has also given its name to one of the former Scottish counties. Standing 67 miles from Newcastle, and just over 57 from Edinburgh, it occupies a near central position in a region once comprehended in its entirety within the ancient kingdom of ...

People of African heritage have been present in the British Isles since Roman times and their lives have been the focus of increasing scholarly, public, and media interest over the last several decades. The original nineteenth-century DNB (1882–1900) had virtually nothing to say on the subject of Black lives. However, both the ...

The relationship between Britain and South Africa is a key topic in imperial history and the histories of the two countries, yet it has been strangely neglected. In their recent collection of essays, published in 2003 as The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa Since the Boer War...

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the entrepreneur is 'one who owns and manages a business'. For many economists, that definition does not adequately capture the unique role of entrepreneurship: that of creating an entirely new product or service. There is then the task of persuading people to buy, through publicity that strives to differentiate a product or service from all others, usually by choosing a brand or trade name that penetrates into consumers' consciousness. Thus ...

The term south-east Asia came into general use during the Second World War and refers to the diverse territories between India and China. The region lies on the crossroads of world civilizations, but its history amounts to far more than the sum of foreign influences. For years, however, many Britons regarded it as ...

If writers of biography tend to adopt styles befitting the lives of their subjects—a frivolous style for the chorus girl, a pious style for the bishop, and so forth—the reason is not far to seek. The chances are high that both writer and reader will be somehow connected with the world of the subject. Writers and readers of the lives of past scientists have changed drastically over the past century or two. In ...