History Today

Through a succession of crises, writes Philip Windsor, including those of the Airlift and the Wall, the West has for seventeen years maintained an apparently untenable position in Berlin.

Elka Schrijver describes how the peace of Westphalia in 1648 marked the close of the Thirty Years’ War and the dawn of a new era for Europe.

Gradually the Chinese Nationalists prevailed over the provincial war-lords, but meanwhile, writes Henry McAleavy, the fatal breach occurred with the Communists.

Jan Read describes how, between 1830 and 1840, two very different English travellers each produced a vivid account of Spanish scenes and personalities.

Goya lived from 1746 to 1828; Douglas Hilt describes how the artist's vigorous work ranges in subject from Court-paintings to the misfortunes of Unreason and War.

In his long series of novels, Galdos presents a vision of Spanish history from Napoleonic times until the 1880s. By Douglas Hilt.

C.R. Boxer profiles the learned and pious Duchess of Aveiro, a proud and forceful member of the Iberian aristocracy, who devoted her wealth to the propagation of the Gospel overseas.

C.R. Boxer describes how the cultivated Viceroy of Portuguese India, on his way home from Goa, had a costly misadventure in the Indian Ocean.

During the fifteenth century the Medici banking house in Florence ‘almost passed belief’ in power and influence.

Robert E. Zegger describes the alarming dip in Anglo-French relations, half way through the reign of Napoleon III.