Alf Townsend The late ALF TOWNSEND was born in London in the 1930s. He was a London cabbie for 42 years and published many books about his life experiences, including The London Cabbie and Blitz Boy.

JOHN RICHARDSON has enjoyed a 58-year career in the film business as an acclaimed special effects technician and supervisor, working on well over 100 films and several of cinema’s biggest franchises.

BENJAMIN LEVY is a former curatorial assistant in the V&A’s Theatre & Performance Department. In that capacity, he helped mount a variety of exhibitions, including You Say You Want a Revolution? and ...

TRACEY NORMAN is an historian and author with a particular interest in witchcraft cases. She is the author of the acclaimed play WITCH, using actual witch trial documents to tell the story of a ...

DAVID CHARLWOOD obtained a first-class honours degree in history from Royal Holloway, University of London, and has worked as an international journalist and in publishing. He is the author of four ...

Slavery has existed for millennia in varying forms in all parts of the world. Here is a brief history of the major slave trades.

Not many people know that between 1718 and 1775 over 52,000 convicts were transported from the British Isles to America, mainly to Maryland and Virginia, to be sold as slaves to the highest bidder. It ...

Author Kurt Kullmann provides 10 historical facts about the first Irish railway, which ran from Westmorland Row to Kingstown in Dublin.

The anchorite, or religious recluse, has been a part of Christian religious life since its early days. They lived solitary lives out in the desert – indeed, these solitaries became collectively known ...

Pirates and music: I imagine what comes into your head is that haunting refrain from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, or perhaps the soaring chords of an orchestral film score and the ...

A century ago the world was in the grip of a devastating influenza pandemic, known as the 'Spanish Flu', which killed millions worldwide.

The discovery of the wreck of ill-fated Titanic on 1 September 1985 ascended Robert Ballard, already one of the world’s leading marine geologists (at the time), to the Olympian glory and truly made ...