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Captain Cook’s greatest achievement of discovering Australia and New Zealand may have gone down in the history books, but so has his one failure: the inability to leave any direct descendants. 

Despite having had six children, all are commonly believed to have died young without any offspring of their own. 

A new book may be about to change all that. After the discovery of a 200-year-old file kept in the National Archives, The Untold Story of Captain James Cook RN by Colin Waters, a writer and historical researcher, has suggested for the first time that Cook’s eldest son did not meet an early demise. Instead, James Cook Jr may have faked his own death in an attempt to desert his post in the Royal Navyand gone on to produce a long line of heirs....

Home to palaces, parliament and Paddington Bear, for many around the world London is the defining image of Britishness. Now, however, a rediscovered writ is believed to show how the capital city was taken over by the French for a few months after the Norman conquest in 1066.

The text, which was found copied into a 14th-century book of London bylaws by Dr Nicholas Karn, a historian at Southampton University, suggests that William the Conqueror took possession of London after he invaded and then sold the city back to the English. The passage has never been previously published.

Squeezed on to a page below other charters, the writ is a Latin transcription of a lost Old English original. It had been hitherto neglected because of the difficult and slightly odd nature of the language....

The image of William Shakespeare as a learned poet for all ages may have originated from the Bard himself, to create a brand and establish his legacy, it has been revealed.

The makers of the First Folio portrayed Shakespeare as part of an Oxford University clique, despite him having no formal connection to the place, research by Dr Chris Laoutaris, associate professor at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, suggests...

A series of songs and operatic arias found among the papers of a Dutch merchant who was captured in the first Napoleonic War will be heard for the first time in 200 years.

The National Archives is holding a concert in London this month to bring these forgotten pieces to a modern audience. The music was found with about 2,000 letters belonging to Jan Bekker Teerlink, a merchant travelling on the Henriette, a ship captured by British in 1803...

Sinking submarines and bugging enemies might seem better associated with a spy novel than with BT. Yet two secret Second World War diaries from the telecoms company’s predecessor have revealed the key role it played in the fight against the Nazis.

The diaries — declassified in 2019 and now available online to the public — shed new light on the work undertaken during the war...

The history books may portray Winston Churchill as an anti-appeaser but new evidence shows he was seeking a peace deal only two days before the Second World War started.

A transcript detailing his efforts has been found in the papers of TP Conwell-Evans, secretary of the Anglo-German Fellowship, which was founded in 1935 and forged close links with senior Nazis, including Adolf Hitler...

“Women and children first”. The order given as the Titanic sank 110 years ago became infamous, and even brought shame on the men who survived. None more so than the chairman of the White Star Line, J Bruce Ismay.

Ismay became known as the “coward of the Titanic” after he made it off the ship, which sank on 15th April 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. Now, a distant cousin of his is fighting to clear his name...

When Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1867 on a reading tour he was fêted everywhere he went and enjoyed meals filled with “lots of alcohol and cigars”.

However, even for the celebrated novelist it seems there is no such thing as a free lunch. New research into Dickens' letters has revealed that the author, probably suffering from gum disease, had brought with him two dentures — both unusable...

In our modern, image-conscious world, going bald is many men’s worst nightmare.

Now clay tablets from 2,600 years ago suggest that people in ancient societies also fretted over their follicles.

The physicians of an Assyrian king appear to have set down an early attempt at a cure for baldness in what is thought to be the world’s first encyclopaedia for medicine...

The literary works of Charles Dickens have been translated into 150 languages and read the world over.

However, there is one body of his work which has remained unread and still proves a mystery to academics. The reason: Dickens wrote it in complex code.

Researchers have long been trying to understand the mystery of a note known as the Tavistock letter and several other coded manuscripts by Dickens. They have now invited the public to try to crack the puzzle — with a cash prize on offer to those who can do it.

Charlotte Brontë and her father, Patrick, survived the tuberculosis epidemics that ravaged the rest of their family because of natural immunity, research suggests.

TB bacteria can remain dormant in the bodies of people exposed to infection so that they do not fall ill but are not necessarily immune. Emma Langan, a biomedical science student at Teesside University, has concluded, however, that Patrick and Charlotte were likely to have been genuinely immune to the disease...

Wilkins Micawber, the optimist of David Copperfield, believed that when in financial strife, something would turn up. For Charles Dickens’s father, upon whom the character was based, that something was his son.

A previously unseen letter, written by Charles Dickens in March 1841 and preserved within a private collection for more than a hundred years, has recently shed more light on the issue of John Dickens’s debt and the way his son dealt with it...

It is a touching tale of humanity amid conflict. British and German soldiers emerged from their trenches on Christmas Day 1914 to meet in No Man’s Land for a game of football. For many the festive truce had a more solemn tone, though.

Elsewhere on the front line, it has now emerged, a German commander told the men who were his adversaries about a surprising act of kindness...

Dame Margot Fonteyn was one of Britain’s most illustrious prima ballerinas. Her role as president of the Royal Academy of Dance is less well known, however.

The discovery of unseen footage demonstrating the “Fonteyn Syllabus” has provided a rare glimpse into the origins of the current curriculum used by future stars.

Today the academy endorses programmes of study developed over the years from a curriculum devised by Fonteyn, who died in 1991, and other teachers...

Her voice was described by one critic as one of the loveliest ever, “delicious in its fullness, richness and purity”. Yet no one today can hear the voice of the celebrated Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba in its original trilling glory.

Although recordings were made during her lifetime, the lack of advanced technology has meant that none captured her accurately, and it seemed that her unique sound would be lost...

If women today were told to sort out their “scraggy” necks to be more feminine, there would be outrage. When the instruction was handed out in 1910 it was part of a revolution in women’s rights.

A blog post for the British Newspaper Archives has shone light on the Beauty Book which, for sixpence, provided Edwardian women with nearly 100 recipes for such things as a “fattening cream” to transform the neck into “one of most beautiful feminine charms”...

A tale involving East India Company sailors and a murdered Chinese cobbler would not seem out of place in a Jane Austen novel — a thrilling yarn from Captain Wentworth or Admiral Croft in Persuasion or even midshipman William Price in Mansfield Park.

This is no fiction, however, but a true story involving Austen's brother, Captain Francis William Austen...

Sitting in the Brontë Parsonage museum archives are a pair of native American beaded leather moccasins.

Donated in 1983 by a Brontë enthusiast, the shoes arrived accompanied by a note claiming that they had once belonged to Charlotte Brontë and curators have been puzzled by this ever since. How could they have made their way into the hands of a plain parson’s daughter from Victorian Yorkshire?

Attention all former Teddy boys, mods, rude bwoys, skinheads, punks, ravers and emos: Britain’s first museum dedicated to youth culture needs you.

In an attempt to correct their omission from the history books, the Museum of Youth Culture wants to document the sounds, styles and trends of young people from the past 100 years by collecting material from the public...

It took two failed escapes before Tadeusz Szlenkier was able to leave Poland and join the RAF. While trying to flee the Russian occupation during the Second World War, he was captured both times and eventually sent to a Soviet labour camp. This did not crush his fighting spirit. Upon release, he rejoined Polish forces and was sent to the Middle East before getting on a boat for Britain...