Literature

F. Bastian finds that in composing his lively Tour, Defoe drew upon memories of journeys he had actually made and also upon the writings of earlier observers.

Michael Strachan introduces one of the most conspicuous members of this celebrated Jacobean drinking and dining club centred on the Mermaid Tavern in London; the eccentric ‘legstretcher’ Thomas Coryate.

Harold F. Hutchison compares fact with fiction in Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

Robert Habsland introduces an intrepid traveller, an appreciative tourist and an ardent advocate of feminism; Lady Mary was the first distinguished woman of letters that England had seen.

Between the coming of St. Patrick and the arrival of the Normans art, literature and religion flourished in a country that had no organised central government.

Unlike Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar had to deal with rivals as ambitious and influential as himself; and S. Usher finds that he has left a lucid account of his rise to greatness.

James Shiel describes how, as one of those writers who forged a link between classical antiquity and medieval Christendom, Boethius was executed in 524 at the command of the barbarian king he served.

A characteristic product of eighteenth-century liberalism, the twenty-eight volumes of French Encyclopedia are here reviewed and reassessed by John Lough.

One of Napoleon's most prominent enemies among authors cast the Duke, during the Allied Occupation of Paris, in the role of Saviour of France. She was not much mistaken, writes Harold Kurtz.