History Today

Andrew Boyd tells the story of the ill-fated mission of a papal nuncio whose blundering zeal doomed the hopes of Irish Catholics of profiting from the civil war between Charles I and his Parliament in England.

Douglas Johnson examines the powerful hold Les Invalides exercises over France's historical mythology.

Mira Bar-Hillel on plans to rebuild Poland's Elizabethan theatre.

Irene Coltman Brown begins this series on the historian as philosopher by taking a look at the Greek historian known as the Father of History.

David Birmingham draws on the private papers of an 18th-century Swiss cheese farmer to recreate a world whose business sophistication and economic arrangements cut across the context of the rustic joys of an Alpine lifestyle.

Geoffrey Clarke on netting the Poll Tax in Hastings.

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart had a distinguished career as a diplomat, writer and director-general of Churchill's Political Warfare Executive during the Second World War. But as a young diplomat and Acting Consul-General in Moscow, he was caught up in a chain of events that included being head of Britain's first mission to the Bolshevik Government, subsequent involvement in a plot to overthrow them, and imprisonment in the Kremlin - worthy of a novel by Le Carré.

John Crowfoot considers the role flags and anthems have played in defining Soviet and Russian identities, past and present.

Raymond Pearson on history repeating itself and other lessons from the upheavals in Eastern Europe.