History Today

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.

Before the Act of Union in 1800, writes John Stocks Powell, Grattan dominated Irish politics over twenty years in an age of enlightenment that failed.

Helena Snakenborg came to London in the train of a visiting Swedish Princess. Appointed a Maid of Honour to Queen Elizabeth, writes Gunnar Sjögren, she married twice and lived in England for seventy years.

Not until the second decade of the twentieth century, writes Alun C. Davies, was a standardised method of time-keeping established throughout Britain.

C.V. Wedgwood analyses the life, death, and influence of Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford.