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King Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon King of England, is generally believed to have perished at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by having a Norman arrow shot through his eye, an event depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry (although, as it is actually unclear in the Bayeux Tapestry whether or not the...

Researchers have discovered that the Avebury stone circle may have had more stones than previously thought. Avebury, the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world, so big than part of the village of Avebury lies within it, may have originally had 30 stones in its southern inner circle...

The IMF has said that Britain will overtake her old rival France next year to become the world's fifth-largest economy and the second-largest in Europe. It predicts growth of 3.2 per cent in the UK this year and 2.7 per cent in 2015, compared with just 0.4 per cent and 1 per cent in France...

Ukip are celebrating after getting their first ever MP - and could now be on the verge of getting into power as a government for the first time next year. Eurosceptic Douglas Carswell who, just a few weeks ago, defected from the Tories to the anti-EU, anti-uncontrolled immigration party in...

Stephen Sutton, the man who invented the World Wide Web, and the Great Britain Invictus Games team were amongst the big winners at the 16th annual Pride of Britain Awards at London's Grosvenor House on Saturday night. The televised awards ceremony awards those British people who have acted...

Britain is to send 750 troops, three Merlin helicopters and an RFA medical support ship to Sierra Leone to help tackle the deadly Ebola outbreak - and has now called on other countries to also "step up to the plate." Troops will head to Sierra Leone as early as next week, where British...

A 1,800-year-old finely carved stone female head has been uncovered by archaeologists in South Shields, Tyne and Wear, in north eastern England. It is thought to represent the Roman goddess Brigantia, who was once worshipped on the banks of the River Tyne. It was discovered by a volunteer on...

Professor Brian Cox, the University of Manchester physicist and former keyboard player with the pop band D:Ream (famous for the 1993 hit Things Can Only Get Better), is back with his fourth major BBC science documentary series - Human Universe. In his latest BBC series, Prof Brian Cox asks...

We used to just forecast the weather on Earth. But now we are to forecast the weather in space, too. The Met Office, the UK's national weather service, is opening its "solar storm" centre today. The Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC) in Exeter, Devon, where the Met Office is...

Watched the first episode of the new, very British, BBC sitcom Detectorists last night on BBC Four. Detectorists is all about digging. Mackenzie Crook (who is best known for playing Gareth Keenan in The Office, Ragetti in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and Orell in Game of Thrones), who...

I watched the first episode of the brilliant new BBC documentary series by Simon Reeve - Sacred Rivers - last night. Simon makes travel documentaries in little-known areas of the world and has written books on international terrorism, modern history and his globe-trotting adventures. In his...

Two injured Afghanistan War veterans are part of a four-man team which is to take on the route which almost defeated Ernest Shackleton 100 years ago. The team is flying out to Argentina today to begin what promises to be a gruelling five-week trek across one of the most inhospitable...

This remarkable series of pictures shows just how much life has changed in the streets of London surrounding the River Thames in the last 150 years. A unique series of photographs taken in the 1860s, using an early type of camera, showcase life in Victorian London for those living in the...

It's party conference season in the UK but, unlike most party conference seasons, this one comes in the run-up to a General Election, so this is where the General Election campaign really starts. The Labour Party held their conference in Manchester last week, but the speech made by Marxist Ed...

In her new book Comic, Curious & Quirky: News Stories From Centuries Past, Levin pulls together some of the most bizarre tales to fill the columns of British newspapers as far back as the 1700s – from the woman who in 1830 poisoned her dinner guests, then died, having forgotten she'd used the...

More players are now taking up blind cricket than ever before but why is the sport becoming increasingly popular? Hassan Khan: 'Blind cricket changed my life'...

The northern gannet is the largest seabird in the North Atlantic, and the UK is home to TWO THIRDS of the entire world's population of them. And one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in the UK is seeing these magnificent birds dive into the sea to catch fish. Northern gannets can dive from a...

An amateur metal detectorist has unearthed one of the largest hoards of Roman coins ever found in Britain. Laurence Egerton, 51, made the discovery as he explored land near Seaton, in Devon - and he was so concerned someone would steal it, he camped out for three nights while archaeologists...

Jackanory was a BBC children's TV series that was originally broadcast between 1965 and 1996 that was designed to stimulate an interest in reading. The show's format, which varied little over the decades, involved an actor reading from children's novels or folk tales, usually while seated in...

Liverpool progressed to the fourth round of the Capital One Cup at Anfield last night - but only after winning the joint-longest penalty shootout in English football history against Middlesbrough. After the match ended 2-2 after extra time, with young English player Jordan Rossiter, who has...