History Today

A few questions are posed on the 'magic of history' in the twentieth century.

The creation of the powerful propaganda image of the early medieval king as divinely-inspired and sanctioned was the work not of Charlemagne but his lesser-known grandson.

Bartholomew Dias' voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in the late 15th century marked the apex of an extraordinary Portuguese expansion overseas and the start of a fateful European impact on South Africa. 

J Mordaunt Crook examines the history of a Gothic church in West London.

'Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.' The colourful activities of a religious movement in the 1930s were to lead to landmark Supreme Court decisions about the relations of religion and the state.

Popular obsession with German espionage in the early 1900s proved to be well-founded, as Nicholas Hiley shows in an examination of the prewar activites of a group of agents controlled by the 'Kaiser's Spymaster'.

Felix Barker discusses the little-known civil defence preparations to meet a Spanish invasion and looks at what might have happened.

Rosemary Burton remembers a special 400th anniversary in Welsh history