Historiography

Michael Howard introduces the most popular historian in Victorian England.

Alan Bullock ruminates on the role of historians in Western society.

 Michael Grant introduces a nineteenth century historian of Rome whose work is still authoritative and valid.

A leading actor in the civil war, Clarendon in his History offered an interpretation of the causes of the conflict which has been much debated by later historians, as Christopher Hill discusses here.

Gillian Tindall reflects on a recent discovery by a Dickens scholar, which offers new insights into the great writer’s early years.

A great historian of an age he disliked, Harold Mattingly shows how Tacitus has given posterity an incomparable picture of the early Roman Empire.

Nigel Saul remembers a historian who was one of the most distinguished medievalists of his generation.

In recent decades few fields of historical inquiry have produced as rich a body of work as the British Civil Wars. Sarah Mortimer offers a guide to the latest scholarship.

Growing nationalism in the UK’s constituent countries threatens the study of Celtic languages and history, argues Elizabeth Boyle.

The romantic ‘braveheart’ image of Scotland’s past lives on. But, as Christopher A. Whatley shows, a more nuanced ‘portrait of the nation’ is emerging, one that explores the political and religious complexities of Jacobitism and its enduring myth-making power.