History Today

Penelope Corfield provides an overview of the many recent lively and entertaining studies of 18th-century Britain.

Politics should be informed not just by history but by historians, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.

A hilltop view of a smouldering city, following the devastating earthquake of April 18th, 1906.

Did the story of a stolen Roman ring provide the basis for one of the 20th century’s most popular works of fiction? Mark Horton and Lynn Forest-Hill tell the story of the archaeological dig which  fuelled the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Amanda Foreman tells the story of the Stuart courtier, Frances, Countess of Essex.

The world’s first global commodity spawned a network of traders, producers and consumers, whose interactions shaped the modern world, as Giorgio Riello explains.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain acquired the tiny island of Heligoland in the North Sea. Ashley Cooper and Stephen Cooper describe how, as the European rivalries shifted in the 19th century, it came to be used as a bargaining chip with Germany.

In 1861 a young clergyman’s son arrived in British Guiana to oversee a sugar plantation. Over the next 30 years Henry Bullock’s letters home caught the texture of life in a remote backwater of Empire – though they don’t tell the whole story, as Gaiutra Bahadur explains.

Before he was tamed by respectable Victorians, the archetypal, bibulous Briton, beloved of cartoonists and satirists, embodied all the virtues and vices of the late 18th century and the scandal-rocked Regency.

The court martial and acquittal of a senior British Intelligence officer accused of presiding over abuses of German prisoners during the Second World War highlights failings in intelligence policy and accountability, says Simona Tobia.