Britain

John of Gaunt's dynastic ambitions coincided with the urgent need of the Portuguese Crown for foreign support to secure its sovereign independence - the catalyst for a royal marriage and England's oldest alliance.

World wars, dictatorship and the tensions of empire tested, but not to breaking point, the alliance in the twentieth century. Tom Gallagher outlines how economic and strategic considerations made Portugal a focus for Allied concern in the Second World War.

An embryo patron of the English Renaissance and a lost Protestant hero? Roy Strong examines aspirations and might-have-beens in a major new study of Charles I's elder brother.

'Manners makyth man...' but as the 19th century dawned; English intellectuals became increasingly concerned with expanding education and 'useful knowledge' down to the lower orders.

Tony Aldous on a Worcestershire town whose natural resources brought the Romans there.

'Rude, rough and lawless' was one view of the women and children employed on the land in Victorian England. But was theirs a harsher fate than work in the factory system?

Stephen Williams investigates the excavations at Leadenhall Court of the surviving portion of Roman London’s Forum- Basilica.

The legacy of empire brought nearly half a million blacks and Asians to Britain in the fifties in search of a better life.

'I have been ostracised by my native country.... I am boycotted by my adopted country'. During the two world wars Germans in Britain found themselves to be enemy aliens, victims of suspicion and prejudice in a country which had been their refuge from a hostile homeland.

'A re-banished Jewry weeping beside the waters of Modern Babylon'. Between 1880 and 1914 the mass exodus of Jews from Russia and Poland fled hunger and persecution and came west.