History Today

‘The story of Charles XII,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘was entertaining; that of Peter instructive.’ A. Lentin describes a unique example of early modern Franco-Russian relations.

Colin Davies describes how, in the 6th century B.C., Miletus became the birthplace of Western science and philosophy.

Hugh Carleton Greene heads to the Caribbean to find a long-lost relative.

J.J.N. McGurk describes how vanity and the ambitions of families and religious houses prompted the widespread invention of documents upon property and genealogy.

S. G. F. Brandon describes how the Roman legate faced the problems of a Jewish Revolt.

J.H.M. Salmon portrays two men of letters - François de La Rochefoucauld and Jean François Paul de Gondi - as mirrors to both each other, and to the seventeenth century French society they wrote about.

H. Ross Williamson profiles the life and career of Cardinal Reginald Pole: cousin to Henry VIII; once Papal candidate; ‘a humanist of European reputation’; Pole spent much of his life abroad, in an artistic and philosophical circle that included Michelangelo.

H.T. Dickinson describes how, in his best-known work, Bolingbroke sought to produce a cure for present-day ills by rehearsing the virtues of an imaginary past.

Oliver Warner questions whether Calder's reprimand for his action with the French in 1805 was just.

G.A. Rothrock describes how, at the close of the French Wars of Religion in 1627-8, the Protestant centre of La Rochelle succumbed to royal siege.