History Today

Gillian Mawrey, editor of Historic Gardens Review, introduces the study of historic gardens as a hotbed of historical research, sheer pleasure and campaigning for conservation.

Alison Barnes has unearthed a transcription of the Privy Purse Accounts of Charles II that fills the gap for 1666, for which year the originals are now lost. They offer a fascinating glimpse of how the King liked to spend his time and his money.

Ben Power takes a tour of the London Library, an invaluable resource for historians and History Today, and describes plans for a sensitive expansion beginning this year.

David Culbert visits an exhibition at the Allied (Alliierten) Museum in the former headquarters of the US occupation forces in Berlin.

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.