England

D.H. Burton describes how, aged twenty-five, Holmes, an influential future US supreme court justice, paid a summer visit during which he made many distinguished friendships.

Arnold spent some thirty-five years as an inspector of schools, in Europe as well as in England. David Hopkinson describes how the Victorian poet hoped education would humanize pupils and weaken the prejudices of nation and class.

David Hopkinson introduces a liberal-minded Victorian poet, seriously concerned with the effects of education.

In the early eighteenth century, writes Zélide Cowan, John Lethbridge spent some forty years salvaging treasure from sunken ships.

Gerald Morgan introduces Byron’s friend and executor; a radical Whig and head of the East India Company during the Afghan troubles of 1835-43.

Alan Haynes describes how Italian scholars, merchants and craftsmen were welcomed in Elizabethan London and enjoyed high patronage.

The Charity school movement in the eighteenth century, writes L.W. Cowie, was the first attempt to provide for the education of the children of the poor in England.

Barbara Kerr profiles a nineteenth-century country vicar who was a militant reformer in sewage and sanitation.

The author of the History of My Own Time was both a keen churchman and a compulsive writer. Mary Delorme describes how Burnet's style, whether graphic, humorous or pompous, was usually as free and expansive as the historian himself.

During the Victorian Age, writes Courtney Dainton, when many social reformers came from the upper classes, Smith was a philanthropist who had himself experienced the hardships of the very poor.