After the sack of Rome by the Goths in the year 410, the Roman world experienced some of the unease that afflicts Western civilization today; S.G.F. Brandon describes how the late Roman world found assuagement in the writings of Saint Augustine.
In London, at Harvard, in Washington and during his extensive world travels, Henry Adams elaborated his penetrating views on the nature of history and of the American experience. By John Raymond.
Two very different French travellers, a romantic and a realist, have left us their opinions of the rising civilization of the United States. Arnold Whitridge assesses two contrasting historical viewpoints.
The majestic narrative of the fortunes of the Jewish people, as unfolded in the Pentateuch, incorporates four different strains of literary tradition. Once fused together, writes S.G.F. Brandon, they produced a philosophy of history that has influenced not only Israel itself but the whole of Christian Europe.
At a time when a Communist government is trying to destroy all links between Romania and the West, Radu R. Florescu surveys the facts and legends about his country's past.
The importance of these much-debated scrolls is here interpreted by Cecil Rothin the light of the events that took place during the first-century Jewish Revolt against the power of Rome.
Albert Makinson offers a study of Edward II's “over-mighty subject” who, having suffered a violent death as a rebel against the King, became a popular hero and a strong candidate for canonization.
Critics of Cromwell, both British and foreign, have long continued to “find what they were looking for” in the records of his career and character. Some have denounced him as a hypocritical tyrant; others have described him as the finest type of middle-class Englishman. Once at least, writes D.H. Pennington, he has been acclaimed as “the greatest Englishman of all time”.
S.G.F. Brandon poses the question: was Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the first century A.D., an arch Quisling of the ancient world? He “could scarcely have given a worse impression of himself than that to be derived from the Jewish War,” whence he emerges as an unscrupulous opportunist whose conduct is rendered even more distasteful by a hypocritical profession of the highest motives.
In Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, P.A. Brunt sees why and how the Greeks failed to encompass peace and unity.
