Leonardo and the battle of Michelangelo’s penis

Jonathan Jones: My love for microhistory inspired me to uncover Leonardo da Vinci's attempt to shroud the greatest nude statue ever

World’s most expensive book comes up for sale

Sotheby's to auction Audubon's Birds of America and Shakespeare's First Folio from estate of late Lord Hesketh

Carola Hicks obituary

Art historian and biographer, her work infused large, iconic subjects with new life

Niall Ferguson is wrong about the national curriculum

Response: History departments are thriving under a flexible framework, write Sarah Hannam and Jane Cavanagh

The incomparable Simon Schama – star of page, then screen

Jonathan Jones: Enough snobbery over his TV career. As Schama's books show, he created the path lesser historians stumblingly follow

In praise of… world histories

Editorial: Most history these days deploys the metaphorical magnifying glass. All hail, then, to those rare scholars who rescue the wood from the trees

My new hobby? Developing interests. Or trying to. It’s not easy though – an old pot is just an old pot

Charlie Brooker: I wish I was into history, but I'm not. Besides robbing me of hours of potential hobby time, this lack of historical interest leaves me feeling guilty and uninformed

Writings from Warsaw

Historian Samuel Kassow tells John Crace that by recording their life in the ghetto, Jews defied Nazi efforts to destroy them

The essential Bible stories

The top five stories from the good book

Book of revelation

All children should be taught the Bible at school, says Andrew Motion. Without the great stories, they cannot hope to understand history and literature. Janet Murray reports