13 h. ago Solving the bizarre story of two of Britain’s most mysterious historic artefacts

Revealed: a tale of forgotten empires, blood-soaked wars, Macbeth and the Pink Panther

Politics

8 d. ago ‘A gaming success story’: how Warhammer became one of Britain’s biggest companies

Worth £6bn and with revenues recently rising by 10.9%, the niche interest game has become a global businessYou don’t need to spend your weekends organising a face-off between bloodthirsty orcs and elves to have heard of the game Warhammer.So popular is the fantasy game that its parent company Games Workshop is valued at a staggering £6bn and is almost ever-present on British high streets. Continue reading...

Events

9 d. ago Idyllic village forgotten by time with babbling brook and tragic past

Just six miles from Sheffield, this charming South Yorkshire village hides the story of one of Britain's deadliest Victorian floods that claimed 250 lives in 1864

Events

2 w. ago Study unravels secrets of history’s ‘most mysterious manuscript’

Study shows how mystery text could be done entirely by hand using 15th-century materials

Politics

3 w. ago Andrew Miller: ‘DH Lawrence forced me to my feet – I was madly excited’

The novelist on how The Rainbow made him want to write, the strange genius of Penelope Fitzgerald and finding comfort in TintinMy earliest reading memory Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not always a patient teacher, and I was often a slow learner, but the scene, the tableaux, in memory, has the serenity of an icon.My favourite book growing up Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. It’s a story set in Roman Britain; the Eagle is the lost standard of the ninth legion. I was a boy already obsessed by all things Ancient Roman (the alternative to the kind of boy obsessed with dinosaurs). One of the places I remember reading it is in bed with my dad. On Sunday mornings my brother and I would climb into the big bed. My parents had long since split up. There was a picture on the wall, a modest reproduction of Velázquez’...

Politics

4 w. ago The BBC tells the story of Britain in a way Netflix simply cannot. In the year to come, please remember that | Tony Hall

I love many shows on the streaming channels, but the BBC is our storyteller. It defines a nation and its culture – and we must defend itTony Hall was director general of the BBC between April 2013 and August 2020Don’t let President Trump cloud the real debate about the BBC. Of course, his demand for damages of no less than $5bn has dominated our thinking about the corporation over the past few weeks, as has its cause. But let’s get this into perspective. This was a serious own goal and journalists make mistakes. Salvation in this case would have been a line of script between the clips, or once a mistake had been discovered, a very speedy public acknowledgment. Now, though, the BBC is right not to yield on this. It has apologised. And, unlike other broadcasters and institutions in the United States, it doesn’t need the president’s support. This is a chance to demonstrate the BBC’s independence. Fight on.But we must not let this cloud the debate here about the sort of BBC we all want ...

Politics