Volume 2 Issue 12 December 1952

Nearly 35 centuries ago the first Empress in the history of the world proclaimed herself Pharaoh; Jon Manchip White records how Queen Hatshepsut then went on to rule for more than 20 years.

The diffusion of wild flowers, thousands of miles from their native places, is a “vegetable record” Geoffrey Grigson suggests, of human migration and colonization.

N.P. Macdonald explains how modern Brazil owes its extensive frontiers, and the discovery of many of its natural riches, to the journeys far inland, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of pioneers in search of slaves.

No monument of Christian architecture is more celebrated than the Cathedral of Chartres. Peter Quennell here traces both the origins of the great church and the effect it has exercised on succeeding generations.

Duff Cooper examines the consistencies and differences between two centuries’ worth of Prime Ministers and asks, 'Has there been a truly great statesman among them?’

John Clive records how, during the opening years of the 19th century, Edinburgh added to its European reputation by producing one of the most famous critical magazines of the age.