History Today

A.H. Burne describes how, 500 years ago at the Battle of Castillon, where the Great Talbot lost his life, the English crown forfeited its 300-year-old dominion over Aquitaine.

The crisis of 1909-11 involved two General Elections and a threat to flood the House of Lords with newly created Liberal peers. It ended, as Steven Watson notes here, in a triumph for the progenitors of the modern welfare state.

According to this Essay in Archaeological Detection by Jon Manchip White, the famous legend of the loves of Tristan and Isolt may very well rest on a solid historical basis.

Peter Quennell says Hogarth’s great survey of the Humours of an Election is one of the masterpieces of English 18th century painting

John Wheeler-Bennett's account, with many illuminating details, of the attempt that nearly put an end to the Third Reich.

J.W.N. Watkins illustrates how the great individualist thinkers of the 17th century had a profound effect upon the development of modern Europe.

Nicholas Lane documents how the big branch banks of today have their origins largely in the numerous private banking partnerships, founded in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Member of Parliament, friend of Philip Sidney, local historian, and promoter of American colonization, Richard Carew was one of the important provincial figures of his age, as F.E. Halliday here describes.

The contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I, Ivan IV was the real founder of modern Russia, and, Jules Menken writes, the originator of the disciplinary system by means of which many Russian rulers since have held, their power.

The observations of Edmond Geraud, a schoolboy pursuing his studies in Paris, throw fresh light on the stormiest years of the French Revolution.