History Today

‘The present folly’, wrote Horace Walpole in 1777, ‘is late hours.’ To arrive late at a party in the Georgian era, writes John Riely, was a sign of fashionable distinction.

Queen Victoria’s uncle and immediate predecessor was a good-humoured, simple-minded sovereign, whose bustling amiability much endeared him to his subjects, writes Joanna Richardson.

Britain’s contribution to the First World War was not merely confined to the trenches. How did the Royal Navy experience Christmas 1914?

Predating Castro’s Communist Revolution, the unequal US-Cuban power relationship stretches back to the turn of the 20th century.

The whole of Stendhal’s youth was spent under the aegis of Napoleon, and Napoleonic legend played an increasing part in his later writings.

Poet Laureate from 1850, writes Joanna Richardson, Tennyson became an acknowledged interpreter of Victorian morals and politics.

In British theatrical history, writes Joanna Richardson, the famous Kemble line has an almost unequalled record of achievement.

Joanna Richardson describes how, in 1865, Miss Buss told a School Enquiry Commission: 'I am sure that the girls can learn anything they are taught in an interesting manner.’

Joanna Richardson describes some French visitors to England, from Louis XVIII and Madame de Stael to Verlaine and Mallarme.

John Prest describes how the progressive Whig reformer of the 1830s became unpopular as Prime Minister after 1846.