This week's update features silk pyjamas, unlikely spies and a 182-year-old giant tortoise.
* A victory medal from the First World War One has been found after forty years.
* Poetry and literature were not the only art forms to be influenced by the chaos of war, but who were the four First World War composers to define the conflict?
* It sounds like something from Blackadder Goes Forth but actuially happened on the Western Front during the war: First World War British intelligence officers suspected two cats and a dog of spying for the Germans.
* Myth, memory and the First World War: the strange case of Henry Williamson.
* Direct from the trenches: the objects that defined the First World War.
* The First World War training battlefield discovered in Hampshire was found after Rob Harper, conservation officer at Gosport council, identified it from old aerial photographs.
* Milady's Boudoir shares her enthusiastic response to the 'History Wardrobe' Premiere: Women and The Great War.
* Recently there has been a lot of Italian fury surrounding the rifle ad that stars Michelangelo's David but should there be restrictions on how a country's cultural heritage is used?
* Scientists have digitally reconstructed a Renoir portrait with its original colours as they would have looked to the artist when he finished the painting in 1883, before the red pigments he used had faded.
* George Cruikshank: the man who drew Dickens's Artful Dodger.
* Five historical assassination attempts that went horribly wrong ...
* 'Crime Fiction Lover' reviews The Darke Chronicles: Tales of a Victorian Puzzle-Solver.
* The Guardian provides a round up of rivalrous literary awards.
* George Packer asks if Amazon is bad for books?
* Are we on first name terms yet? Matt Houlbrook ponders on what #twitterstorians should call their subjects.
* Liverpool's advertising history has been revealed in ghost signs across the city.
* Publishing Perspectives asks just how should you write?
* Sherlocked: What to expect from the first ever Sherlock convention.
* Apparently a million Vikings still live among us, with one in thirty-three men claiming to be direct descendants from the Norse warriors.
* Malorie Blackman asks why are libraries mandatory in prisons but not schools?
* Is Jane Austen's Emma a girl for today?
* Meet Jonathan, St Helena's 182-year-old giant tortoise.
* Former Cabinet minister and veteran left-wing campaigner Tony Benn has died at home. Benn was one of the biggest - and at times most controversial - figures in Britain's Labour movement and was the first Peer to renounce his title after the passing of the Peerage Act in 1963.
* New evidence suggests that Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess had help during his secret flight to Britain.
Which history and publishing stories have you enjoyed reading this week?