History Today

From A.J.P. Taylor’s mesmerising lectures in front of a black backdrop to technicolour Civilisation and the ground-breaking World At War, Taylor Downing looks at the early days of history on television.

In the wake of the parliamentary expenses scandal, some MPs have met their constituents to explain themselves, with bruising consequences. Jon Lawrence looks back to when such holdings-to-account were commonplace and benefited democracy.

Peter H. Wilson unravels one of the most notoriously bloody and complex conflicts in European history to answer the question.

Tsar Nicholas II and his family arrived on the Isle of Wight on August 2nd, 1909, during the week of the Cowes Regatta.

On August 1st, 1259, the English renewed a truce which recognised Llywelyn ap Gruffydd as Prince of Wales.

Secrecy shrouded the ways of politicians until the 18th century. Then John Wilkes came along, writes David Horspool.

Christians have long relied on scribes’ copies of Biblical texts; J. K. Elliot describes how the Codex Sinaiticus, discovered in 1844, dates from the fourth century.

In the second of our occasional series exploring the ways in which topical historical subjects are being tackled in a variety of media, Rohan McWilliam examines a time in Britain’s history that seems to repay frequent revisiting more than a century after it ended.

‘Garotting’, or the strangulation of a victim in the course of a robbery, haunted the British public in the 1850s. Emelyne Godfrey describes the measures taken to prevent it and the range of gruesome self-defence devices that were often of greater danger to the wearer than to the assailant.