History Today

W.H. Chaloner assesses the life and career of Ferdinand De Lesseps, the French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal.

J.L. Carr describes how, in revolutionary France, the debonair delights of civilization were replaced by a more virtuous albeit often stale cultural climate.

For more than four years after the death of Nelson, Admiral Collingwood held naval command from the southern tip of Portugal to the Dardanelles. Piers Mackay writes how, in that time, Collingwood became the prime and sole Minister of England, acting upon the sea.

In the reign of Francis I, writes Desmond Seward, the first modern and last medieval poet attended the French court.

For more than a decade, writes Robert Rhodes James, until personal disaster overwhelmed him in 1890, Parnell and the Irish Nationalists held the balance in the House of Commons, and by a policy of considered obstruction swayed the course of British politics.

Although Canning resigned in 1809, writes Cedric Collyer, the fruits of his foreign policy, and the confirmation of the principles on which it rested, were already apparent by 1812 in the changing face and prospects of the war.

Alan Haynes describes a gallant mercantile endeavour in Tudor relations with Spain.

Today it is hardly possible to equate the Italian Renaissance with the modern world, as Burckhardt did a century ago. But, argues Denys Hay, his discerning study has helped to transform the Western attitude to the past, and its influence remains profound.

An introduction by Geoffrey Parker on the European Witch-craze of the 16th and 17th centuries.

John Terraine studies the effects of Napoleonic doctrine upon the leadership of mass armies in the Industrial Age.