History Today

From Norman times until the fifteenth century, writes L.W. Cowie, the Tower was often a royal residence as well as a fortress and armoury.

Anthony Dent describes how this rich French province remained a royal English vineyard for a good three centuries.

John Wesley spent two years as a chaplain in Georgia in the 1730s; Stuart Andrews describes how forty years later he was much preoccupied with the War of Independence.

Margaret Martyn profiles a seventeenth century missionary in Bengal and Madras who privately traded with ‘interlopers’.

The East India Company, writes R. Cecil, had at first shown a ‘modest interest’ in the civilization of their native subjects; but Evangelical pressure groups recommended a very different attitude.

Versatile artist and vagrant man of the world, Johan Zoffany has left us a vivid and exquisitely detailed record of the late eighteenth-century social scene from Scotland to the Indian subcontinent. By Aram Bakshian Jr.

R.B. Fountain introduces an influential French artist of wild animals and the chase.

Uniquely of engineers, the reputation of Brunel lives on, commemorated by a university, dockyards, steamships, and countless other works of his discipline. But what, asks Walter Minchinton, were his achievements?

Joanna Richardson takes readers on a mid twentieth century architectural tour of Paris; the French capital, she writes, bears the signature of successive rulers.

J.L. Kirby describes the reign of a sovereign with a ‘genius for popular kingship’; Henry V was probably the first English ruler to address his subjects in their native language.