History Today

British missions to the Chinese Court had already run into many grievous difficulties. When a mission was despatched to Burma, writes Mildred Archer, they found their problems no less irksome.

Early in December 1854, a group of miners, led by a hot-headed Irish rebel, defied the forces of the Australian Government. For many Australians, writes T.R. Reese, this gallant but hopeless gesture still symbolizes democracy’s unending struggle to preserve the freedom of the common man.

Bernard Lovell introduces a particularly striking figure in the history of science, Tycho Brahe. This princely astronomer, whose observatory took the form of a fantastic castle, made the series of precious observations from which Kepler evolved his three great laws of planetary movement.

S.G.F. Brandon explains how the images of angelic ministrants that play so large a part in Christian symbolism were derived by European painters and sculptors from the religious conceptions of the ancient Near East.

David Mitchell introduces a seventeenth-century politician who hoped to see the art of government reduced to an exact science, free from “the noise and dirt of party strife.”

Neville Williams profiles Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk (1538-1572), a great territorial magnate, commanding fanatical affection and wielding an influence that was little less than absolute.

C.V. Wedgwood recounts the circumstances the Earl of Arundel’s Embassy to Germany in 1636 as recounted in William Crowne’s Diary, the Earl’s letters and other contemporary sources.

Bernard Pool describes how the diarist was determined, in the interests of the Navy and for his own satisfaction, to strike the best possible bargain for the Crown.

Despite being denounced by Huxley as a man who used high gifts to discredit humble seekers after truth, David Newsome writes of how this Victorian prelate has also been acclaimed as the greatest bishop of his age.

John Andrew Boyle describes how, in the early thirteenth century, the Mongol hordes devastated Turkestan and Persia, where the grandson of Genghis Khan founded a dynasty.