History Today

The 'Life of Alexander' and West Africa

There is evidence, argues Adrian Tronson, to suggest that the 13th-century Mali empire, and its ruler Sundiata, were strongly influenced by the life of Alexander the Great, 356-323 BC, an influence that was to be capitalised on in the late 1950s.

Reading History: The French Revolution

This month History Today publishes the first in a new regular series of bibliographical essays on a wide variety of historiographical topics. The idea of the series is to survey the subject and to provide a guide to the most important and most recent books about it. In the first of the series, Douglas Johnson looks at the French Revolution.