History Today

John of Gaunt's dynastic ambitions coincided with the urgent need of the Portuguese Crown for foreign support to secure its sovereign independence - the catalyst for a royal marriage and England's oldest alliance.

Caroline Bingham tells the tale of how two self-made businessmen in their seventies became the unlikely progenitors of pioneering womens' colleges in Victorian England and America.

Resistance to Napoleon in the Iberian peninsula gave a little-known English general a unique opportunity to remould the Portuguese army.

World wars, dictatorship and the tensions of empire tested, but not to breaking point, the alliance in the twentieth century. Tom Gallagher outlines how economic and strategic considerations made Portugal a focus for Allied concern in the Second World War.

Helen Wallis charts the Portugal's astonishing success in voyages of exploration between 1415 and 1520

A 15th-Century perspective on the European balance of power.

Ann Hills talks of the legend of Peddars Way, a Roman road in Norfolk.

The punishment of a rebellious client-state by Ancient Athens was the peg on which Thucydides hung an eloquent discussion of the morality of power and violence.

The redevelopment of Toxteth in Liverpool means it now once again accommodates the middle classes, Tony Aldous talks of it rehabilitation.

Roy Forster takes a closer look at the history of Home Rule and Union over the last century.