newburyhist.com

The Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 wasn’t the empire’s first foray onto British soil. Almost a century earlier, Julius Caesar made two expeditions to the mysterious, tribal island. The first, in 55 BC, couldn’t genuinely be described as an invasion. Commanding just two legions, Caesar hoped to score

“By accident, a great deal [of J.R.R. Tolkien’s book series “The Lord of the Rings”] can be read topically,” Maj. Warren Lewis, brother to C.S. Lewis, wrote in possibly the first ever review of the novel in 1949. “The Shire standing for England, Rohan for France, Gondor the Germany of

When people think of Switzerland, they tend to think neutrality (and cool pocket knives and stylish watches, I guess). But there was a point when the country was caught up in a religious civil war that their armies tried to resolve with soup, according to lore. In the early 16th century,

In 1937, the British Museum acquired a mysterious Roman coin from a Swiss coin dealer. Made of debased silver, and about the size of a modern British 10 pence, it bore the name and portrait of an emperor completely unknown to history. The portrait on the mystery coin showed a

There were many powerful female rulers during the early medieval period, but few records of them exist. Luckily a historical fluke has left accounts of two of them: the Frankish queens, Fredegund and Brunhild, as Shelley Puhak explains. On 14 April, 586, the cathedral of Rouen was crowded with the

Operation Foxley was the name of the secret plan supported by Winston Churchill to assassinate Hitler in 1944–45. More than 75 years after its conception, the assassination plan remains shrouded in mystery. Eric Lee’s new book is the product of painstaking research and sheds more light on this plan. This

It’s hard to think of a better reason for a celebration than the end of the western half of the most destructive war in human history — and the fall of a regime that’s synonymous with evil. So you’d think that all the people who fought together to defeat a monster

Unscrupulous and opportunistic, Schindler was a playboy and adulterer, and a member of the Nazi Party. In fact, his career bore all the hallmarks of a low-level Nazi functionary: he had served German military intelligence in the run-up to the outbreak of war in 1939, and thereafter he had enriched

After an international agreement in 1954 split Vietnam in two, communist China became an important source of military aid for Ho Chi Minh’s communist government in North Vietnam as a counterweight to the Western democracies supporting South Vietnam. China’s leader, Mao Zedong, wanted the Chinese Communist Party to expand its

December, 1940. With the Blitz devastating Britain’s cities, Lizzie Hayes and the women pilots of the Air Transport Authority are more crucial to the war effort than ever before. But when the relative peace of the village of Scotney is shattered by the disappearance of the Chief Inspector’s niece, it’s