History Today

Brian Winston looks back at some of the ways in which history has been presented on the screen, and sees the documentary based on archival footage as intrinsic to its success.

John Hawkwood, a tanner’s son from Essex, became a mercenary in late fourteenth-century Italy, and after his death acquired a reputation as a first-class general and as a model of chivalry.

Roger Macdonald’s article Behind the Iron Mask published in our November 2005 issue raised a number of questions. Here he answers some of them, and reveals more extraordinary facts.

Cartoon historian Mark Bryant examines the origins of caricature itself, and the ambivalent attitude to it of the man whose name has become synonymous with the emergence of the art in Britain.

Geologist and historian Roger Osborne wants to know just what people mean when they use the ‘C’ word.

Film historian Thomas Doherty does some detective work on a mystery from the 1930s, when the Hollywood studios had to deal with the upsurge of racism in Hitler’s Germany.

The prodigious composer was born in Salzburg on January 27th, 1756.

Simon Kitson explores the prevalence of spying for and against the Nazis in southern France after the German invasion.

Confusion between English and British history goes back a long way, as Alan MacColl reveals.