History Today

Joanna Richardson takes the reader on a culinary tour of the French capital, asking why, for several centuries, Paris has been the gastronomic capital of the Western world.

Michael Greenhalgh describes how a masterpiece of fifteenth-century Italian art was for a long time used as an ashtray, only to pass into the national collections.

John Stocks Powell describes how conflict between Nationalists and Unionists was still unhealed when the First World War began.

Patrick Turnbull writes that the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which opened on March 3rd, 1954, and continued until early May, marked the end not only of French, but of European hegemony in Asia.

Stephen Usher looks back at the life of a leading Athenian orator and Idealist during the city’s long war with Macedonia and its Greek allies.

Europe knew little about black Africa, writes Steven R. Smith, until the trading voyages of the late sixteenth century.

William Seymour describes how a large area of Dorset and Wiltshire, abounding in deer, was hunted by King John and granted to Robert Cecil by James I.

At the end of the sixteenth century, writes David N. Durant, an ostentatious but simple-minded German Duke began pestering Queen Elizabeth to grant him the noblest of all English Orders.

Christopher Hibbert describes how the massacre at Cawnpore was one of the events in the Indian Mutiny not expected by benevolent British Commanders.

‘Unwearied in the office of friendship’, all his life Crabb Robinson was devoted to men of genius and faithfully recorded their behaviour, as Joanna Richardson here discusses.