History Today

Roger Hudson examines a 1915 photograph of the medieval Cloth Hall in the Belgian city of Ypres following heavy German shelling.

Having been moved to London from Nazi Germany, the esteemed library of Renaissance culture played a key role in restoring links between international scholars after the Second World War.

The romantic liaison between the great Amazon warrior queen and the conqueror of the known world has been much mythologised. But did such a pairing really happen?

‘If Napoleon had conducted the campaign of Java exactly as did Auchmuty, whole libraries would have been written in laudation of it. Yet this brilliant and sterling soldier has been forgotten.’ So wrote Sir John Fortescue in his History of the British Army. A loyalist, born in New York, Auchmuty served the British Crown in India, Egypt, Latin America and Java. By Bernard Pool.

The discoverer of oxygen - a man of ‘singular energy and varied abilities’ - was, writes A.D. Orange, also a bold progressive thinker.

A younger son of William IV and Mrs Jordan, writes Martin Murphy, had a natural vocation for the stage rather than the Church.

From 1504 to 1971, writes James O. Mays, the shilling has had a dramatic history.

During the French Revolution, writes Tresham Lever, some political trials took place in Edinburgh for which Lord Braxfield has been intemperately denounced.

Lionel Kochan profiles one of the leading bankers among British Jews, who devoted fifty years of his long life to the welfare of Jewry overseas and the future of Palestine.

Victorian travellers had made Arab studies a romantic discipline; but, writes Alaric Jacob, British involvement in Arab affairs arose from the First World War.