Volume 10 Issue 12 December 1960

Briton Martin Jnr. describes how Lord Dufferin set out for India, intending his rule to be a period of conservative calm, but found himself involved in the anxieties of “The Burmese Adventure”.

The intervention of Mr. Churchill and the Royal Naval Division at Antwerp in early October, 1914, failed to save the city, writes David Woodward, but the vital Channel ports were thereby saved.

‘Whoever is Lord in Malacca, has his hand on the throat of Venice’, wrote a European traveller during the period of the city's greatest glory. G.P. Dartford brings us back to a time when Malacca dominated the trade routes of the East.

For nearly 400 years, London's citizens poured down from the streets to hold a frost fair upon the solid ice of the Thames.

Celebration of Christmas was curtailed by England’s Puritan republic but the methods and results varied considerably.

Painter of genius, gifted courtier and much-travelled man of the world, Rubens reached England in 1629, charged with the delicate task of furthering an entente between the Spanish government and Great Britain. C.V. Wedgwood shows how he enjoyed the conversation of his youthful host, whose fine aesthetic taste he shared, but shrewdly judged the weakness of King Charles I’s diplomacy.