History Today

A Personal Everest

Harriet Tuckey’s relationship with her father was a difficult one. Only at the end of his life did she realise the importance of the contribution he had made to the most celebrated of all mountaineering expeditions.   

Salzburg

Imbued, with the militant spirit of the Counter Reformation, a sixteenth-century Prince Bishop, Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, set out to re-build Salzburg as a Second Rome, as Tudor Edwards here describes.

Four Centuries of Shakespearean Production

F.E. Halliday finds that every age, from the first Elizabethan to the present one, has evolved its own methods of producing Shakespeare; sometimes with results that might have surprised the dramatist.

Shakespeare’s London

Most of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in or around the City of London. By the time he retired, Greater London – a residential as well as a commercial metropolis – was beginning to spring up beyond its ancient limits.

A Fifteenth-Century Merchant family

A solid middle-class clan who exported English wool to foreign markets, the Celys have left behind them a graphic record of their private affairs and shrewd commercial dealings, as Alison Hanham here finds.

The Walcheren Failure, Part I

Prompted by news of a French defeat in 1809, the British Government launched an offensive expedition against the Low Countries which ended in gallant failure. By Anthony Brett-James.

The Death of Charles XII of Sweden

Michael Srigley describes how, on November 30th, 1718, one of the foremost soldiers of the age was shot while besieging a fortress in Norway. Did he succumb to a stray bullet, or was he assassinated?