History Today

Sir Richard and Lady Burton

Joanna Richardson explains how, in Brazil, Damascus and Trieste Isabel Burton accompanied her husband on many of his travels and was his devoted business manager.

Ammianus Marcellinus

Charles Johnston describes how, in the fourth century A.D., the Roman Empire was near its end, but its sophisticated life found a lucid recorder in Ammianus of Antioch. 

The Taste for Mountain Scenery

Though originally seen as ‘monstrous excrescences of nature’, Ronald Rees writes, mountains came into their own during the eighteenth century and began to inspire poetic awe and reverence.

A Missionary on the Amazon

Derek Severn recounts how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a priest from Bohemia served the Society of Jesus in the more remote parts of Brazil and Peru.

A Yorkshireman in Istanbul, 1593

Soon after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, a young Yorkshireman named Edward Barton was despatched to the Sultan’s court to promote the interests of the Levant Company.