Volume 53 Issue 3 March 2003

Documentary film-maker Martin Smith calls for makers of history programmes for television to reassess their standards.

Ian Hargreaves traces the origins, and deplores the impact, of the unholy alliance between public relations and politics, business and journalism.

Sarah Searight tells how the efforts of the little-known Robert Moresby, together with the innovation of the marine steam engine, revolutionised trade and transport for the British Empire in the perilous waterway.

 Robert Morrell presents the UK-based society which seeks to celebrate Thomas Paine.

Lord Harmsworth tells how an accident of birth resulted in his running Dr Johnson’s House in London.

Maurice Keen looks at the significance of female lines of descent in heraldic arms, and what this tells us about women of noble and gentle birth in medieval England.

This swashbuckling chancer lived two lives, the first English, the second Italian. Raymond E. Role chronicles the chameleon career which ranges from Elizabethan privateer, explorer and courtier to Stuart expatriate, religious renegade, shipbuilder, architect, inventor, engineer, cartographer and paterfamilias.

Bevis Hillier investigates the alleged abduction 250 years ago, of a young servant girl, which divided London society at the time and has puzzled historians ever since.

Gilbert Shama looks at the German research into penicillin during the Second World War.