Volume 41 Issue 8 August 1991

John Roberts finds nationalism a better bet than the idylls of Marx for the longue duree of historical understanding.

Keith Nurse describes important Iron Age finds in Norfolk on display at the British Museum

James Driver gains an insight into current food controversies from the Victorians.

Marjorie Morgan discovers the origins of the image-making of modern marketeers and admen in the upwardly mobile world of 19th-century English society.

Peter Wiseman reconstructs the splendour and intrigue of Imperial Rome

Edward Acton looks to the Tsarist ancien regime of the 19th century to set the scene for a historical understanding of Russia that does not throw out the baby with its Marxist bathwater.

Columbus braved superstition and ignorance by sailing across the Atlantic when his contemporaries thought he would fall off the edge. So runs the legend, but Jeffrey Russell reveals here how the Middle Ages were maligned by the creative fiction of subsequent generations.

Richard Cavendish on the 60th anniversary of the National Trust for Scotland.

Richard Vinen compares and contrasts the corner shop visions of British Thatcherism and French Poujadism.