Newbury has had 422 mayoral elections since 1596, and the office holders have included businessmen, bankrupts and ballerinas.

Hugh Pihlens' grandfather lived in rural Latvia until 1905 when he had to escape for his life. What happened to him, and to Latvia, afterwards?

Alice Chaucer was a remarkable woman, thrice married, who lived through turbulent medieval times.

Women are often left out of recorded history, but their lives lie hidden in records, from where Joan Dils pieced together the lives of five Newbury women in Tudor times.

Where can you visit a private library within a church? Or see rare examples of the macabre funerary art which swept Europe after the Black Death? Or find graffiti recalling the incarceration of Levellers in 1649? Catherine Sampson reveals all.