Blanche Berryman, who has died aged 91, was an extraordinarily gifted teacher who made history into everyone's best-loved subject at our stuffy grammar school, Tiffin in Surrey, in the 1950s and 1960s. Never boring, never condescending, sometimes attractively risque, she was the only teacher who kept perfect order in her classroom purely by her inspiration and personality, without the heavy w...

Dan Snow explained how Fred Goodwin was not the first person to fall from grace and how history shows more famous faces have also lost their titles.

Despite receiving the biggest taxpayer-funded bailout in history, nothing much has changed: banks continue to pour money into socially useless lending and risky speculation. Move Your Money is a campaign that launched today to encourage individuals to transfer their money from HSBC, Barclays, RBS, Santander and Lloyds to ethical, local and mutual alternatives such as credit unions, ethical banks a...

History suggests that any greater involvement for the private sector, contained in reform plans, would happen less quickly than imagined

by Sokari Ekine from Pambazuka (pictures © Nairaland.com) Is the Nigerian ‘revolution’ over? Was it just a brief moment in our history when everyone came together believing that this time things would be different? Or has there been a permanent shift in consciousness? Emmanuel Iduma likens Nigeria’s 14-day revolt to a dream from which we awoke

One of the most colourful figures in the history of Irish socialism, Gerry Lawless, who has died in London, made legal history by taking the first case heard at the European Court of Human Rights. It was against his internment during the 1950s. He was the first citizen of any European country to take legal action against a government and, though he lost, he set an important precedent. Gerald ...

The community charge - better known as poll tax - was meant to be a simple and fair way for everyone who used them to pay for local services.

Created to remember one of the darkest chapters in mankind's history, Holocaust Day is for many people an occasion for unadulterated discomfort. Most of my family perished in the Holocaust and those who survived either hid in occupied Poland, pretending to be Catholics, fled to Uzbekistan in the then-USSR or, like Marcel Rayman, fought the Nazis. Today I re-read a letter Marcel sent to his fa...

From vomiting and food abstention to mastication and ‘reducing salons’, a new book shows that weight-loss regimes have a long, weird and unhealthy history.

A shout out to all my fiends in Oz...enjoy the day and make it beaut! Australians all let us rejoice For we are young and free We've golden soil and wealth for toil, Our home is girt by sea: Our land abounds in nature's gifts Of beauty rich and rare, In history's page let every stage Advance Australia fair, In joyful strains then let us sing Advance Australia fair. Beneath our radia...