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During the 18th and 19th Centuries, when the Royal Navy dominated the seas (usually, the Royal Navy was at least a third larger than the next largest navy), life aboard Britain's mighty wooden warships wasn't as romantic as is often portrayed. The food was awful (biscuits were infested by...

Thanks to those clever boffins at Britain's BAE Systems and MoD, British troops will soon be able to see out of the corner of their eyes whilst fighting the enemy on the battle field. British soldiers will be able to spot an enemy out of the corner of their eyes without even turning their...

A recent IPSOS-MORI poll has found that the British think Charles will make a good king, and they believe he should continue to speak out about his views close to his heart - such as helping young people, architecture, the environment etc - when he is king. Peter Hitchens agrees, because our...

British author and poet Lewis Carroll, who was born in the little village of Daresbury in Cheshire in 1832, is famous for being the author of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" and for writing the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky." He loved...

Britain's Houses of Parliament are infested with vermin - no, not politicians, but rats and mice. £60,000 was spent last year in trying to eradicate pests which include fleas in government buildings. The current Houses of Parliament, which are actually a royal palace (Westminster Palace)...

If you don't like going to the dentist today, then thank God you didn't have to go to the dentist in 18th Century Britain. This was, after all, the days before anaesthetic. A book written in 1770 by Thomas Berdmore, who was the dentist to King George III, gives helpful tips to give you a...

Did you know that Prince Charles appeared on Coronation Street in 2000? That he is the only royal to appear nude in a magazine? That his was the first royal birth since the 1600s to not be witnessed by a government minister? And that the ONLY time he had a servant put toothpaste on his...

The Mary Rose was the pride of the Royal Navy during the reign of King Henry VIII. Built in Portsmouth between 1509 and 1510, she was named after Henry VIII's sister Mary and the red and white rose emblem of the Tudor royal dynasty. She originally had 78 guns, but that was upgraded to 91 in...

Letters written by King Henry VIII in 1527 to Anne Boleyn, who would become his second wife, have been made available to the public on the internet. Whilst Henry wrote the letters to Anne, he was still married to the first of his six wives Catherine of Aragon. He would eventually divorce...

The new British TV series "The Devil's Wh ore" hits the country's screens later this week, on Channel 4. The lavish costume drama, partly based on true events, brings the English Civil War (1642-1651) to life through Angelica Fanshawe, a 17-year-old aristocrat who becomes fascinated with...

The second British Army Gurkha in less than a month has been killed in Afghanistan. He is the second Gurkha to be killed in Afghanistan. It is the first time a British soldier has been killed inside a British Army Warrior vehicle in Afghanistan, meaning that the Taliban are using bigger and...

The Queen will step aside in five years' time to allow Charles to reign, according to senior Buckingham Palace officials. By that time Charles, the longest-serving Prince of Wales in history, will be 65. A recent IPSOS-MORI poll has found that a majority of the British public believe that...

Comedy legend, former host of the TV gameshow Bullseye and a Great British institution, Jim Bowen has brought the world's oldest joke book to the London stage. Some of the jokes he told during his stand-up routine come from a 1,600 year old Greek joke book called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict...

For years, the British have been giving stick to the EU over its crazy decision to ban bent bananas - a fruit which, of course, is naturally curved. Foreigners and pro-EU people have dismissed all this as "lies" and "myth", just an excuse for the British to attack the EU, an invention of the...

Naturalist Charles Darwin, one of the people who put the Great into Great Britain, famously sailed around the world on the Royal Navy ship HMS Beagle in the 1830s. He came up with his Theory of Evolution after visiting the Galapagos Islands, now a part of Ecuador, in 1835. It was the behaviour...

On 14th November 1948, the future King Charles III was born, the first son of Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip. Tomorrow, the Prince of Wales turns 60. There has been some speculation the the Queen may pass the crown onto Prince William upon her death, bypassing Charles...

In a scene which harks back to the 18th Century, a group of pirates decided to take on the Royal Navy - and didn't live to tell the tale. The terrified pirates stood with their hands on their heads after the Royal Navy Type 23 frigate, HMS Cumberland, came to the aid of a Danish cargo ship...

Two Royal Marines have been killed in Afghanistan, bringing the British death toll in Afghanistan and Iraq up to the 300 mark. 176 British troops have been killed so far in Iraq and 124 so far in Afghanistan. Last week, a Gurkha was killed in Afghanistan. Yubraj Rai, a 28-year-old from...

Many people are under the false impression than Britain abolished the death penalty in the 1960s, around the same time as many other countries abolished theirs. In actual fact, it wasn't until 1998 that Britain actually abolished the death penalty. Even in the 1990s, there were six offences...

The tiny kingdom of Bhutan, the last-remaining independent Buddhist nation in the Himalayas, has crowned its new monarch. Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck, who was educated at Britain's Oxford University, was finally crowned king after a two-and-a-half year wait for the moment when Bhutanese...