There is a word in English that means smooth, flattering, persuasive talk, the kind that charms and disarms and gently gets its way. That word is blarney, and it comes

In the gentle countryside of Oxfordshire, at the end of a great park landscaped around a shining lake, rises one of the most monumental houses in all of England. Blenheim

If you asked a child to draw a castle, they would probably draw something very like Bodiam. It has everything: four round corner towers, square towers on the walls between,

If you asked Slovaks to name their most beautiful castle, a great many would answer without hesitation: Bojnice. Rising above a leafy park in the country’s west, all pale walls,

On the Volga in medieval Tatarstan, Bolgar was the capital of the Volga Bulgars, where the Islamic world met the northern forests through fur, silver, and faith.

Deep in the Lacandon rainforest of Chiapas, in southern Mexico, a small and otherwise modest Maya city holds one of the greatest artistic treasures of the ancient Americas. Bonampak is

On the fertile plains of central Java, ringed by volcanoes, rises the largest Buddhist monument in the world. Borobudur is not a temple with rooms and halls but a vast

In a quiet French valley stand the tumuli of Bougon, burial mounds raised around 4800 BC. Older than Stonehenge and the pyramids, they reveal how the first farmers honoured their dead in stone.

Most people, asked to name a battle that created a nation, would reach for something dramatic and well known. Almost nobody would say Bouvines. And yet on a hot Sunday

No castle on earth carries a heavier freight of legend than this one. Perched on a rocky bluff above a mountain pass in Transylvania, its pale walls and red roofs