Europe

John B. Morrall describes how worldly learning and a reverence for Christian tradition were combined in the character of “one of the best of the Renaissance Popes.”

Jacquetta Hawkes explains how, at an unpromising period in human history, a sudden upsurge of creative power produced the earliest masterpieces of European art.

Both before and after the fall of the Republic, Roman satirists give us an extraordinarily vivid picture of the society in which they lived, with its materialism, its opportunism, its unceasing pursuit of power and wealth.

Joanna Richardson explains how, in Brazil, Damascus and Trieste Isabel Burton accompanied her husband on many of his travels and was his devoted business manager.

Charles Johnston describes how, in the fourth century A.D., the Roman Empire was near its end, but its sophisticated life found a lucid recorder in Ammianus of Antioch. 

Though originally seen as ‘monstrous excrescences of nature’, Ronald Rees writes, mountains came into their own during the eighteenth century and began to inspire poetic awe and reverence.

The grandson of the famous scholar Ausonius, Paulinus was a cultivated country gentleman, who lived to see the final breakdown and disintegration of the Roman way of life. By Charles Johnston.

Derek Severn explains how the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, spent his final ten years as a prisoner of state in Denmark.

David Woodward describes how, throughout the First World War, the King remained on the narrow strip of Belgium between Ypres and the sea which remained in Allied hands.

2000 years ago, writes William Y. Willetts, magnificent Silks from China began to reach the wealthy families of Rome.