History Today

Ivan Morris asserts that, among the legends of the prehistoric Japanese past, it is the aura of failure and tragedy surrounding his end that establishes Yamato Takeru as a model hero.

Desmond Seward describes the abrupt end of a European military and financial institution.

David Jones profiles the man of whom Gibbon wrote: ‘the genius of Rome expired with Theodosius’.

Nearly four centuries ago, long before the French and the Americans, writes C.R. Boxer, the Spaniards intervened in Cambodia.

‘Of all the arts, the art of medicine is the most distinguished,’ declared Hippocrates, who first released it from the shackles of magic and religion. 

Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson describes the failure of the unfortunate Pretender’s first attempt to invade Scotland.

The English seventeenth century was an Age of Anxiety; Iris Macfarlane describes how Oliver Heywood and other devout spirits sought refuge in religious faith.

Harold Kurtz analyses Spanish predominance in the sixteenth-century West Indies.

During the second half of the seventeenth century, writes Robert Bruce, France hoped to dominate Siam and convert its sovereign to the Christian faith.

Stephen Usher describes how Athens might have kept her empire, had she been able to harness the talents of her splendid citizen Alcibiades.