History Today

Macdonald Daly and Gordon Riddell look back and reflect on the changes in public libraries

Alison Brown evaluates the life and scholarship of the great German historian of Renaissance Italy and his seminal influence on Western cultural history.

Julian Mann observes excavations of the Stuart garden at Kirby Hall.

Peter Bowron looks into excavations found at a Middle Ages hospital in Scotland.

Richard Cavendish explores some Roman artefacts.

Stranger than fiction - Roy Foster explores the metamorphosis of a stiff-upper-lip Boy's Own novelist into a Sinn Fein martyr.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto explores the horizons, activities and seeming contradictions of pre-Reformation Spain's cleric-of-all-trades.

Angela Morgan tells the story of the remodelling of Boscobel House in Shropshire.

Was Britain prepared for war in 1938? Not in the air, argues John Crossland, as he investigates the myths and penny-pinching that nearly scuppered the Spitfire victors of the Battle of Britain.