Cultural

Stephen Usherwood recounts the lively reports sent from the goldfields of Yukon by Flora Shaw, the British journalist and writer, which began to appear in English newspapers in August 1898.

Michael Grant describes how, when Etruscan civilization burst into flower, among its most characteristic products was a wealth of splendid jewels.

M.L. Clarke describes how, from the seventh century onwards, Rome attracted from Britain faithful pilgrims and churchmen with business to transact.

Joanna Richardson takes the reader on a culinary tour of the French capital, asking why, for several centuries, Paris has been the gastronomic capital of the Western world.

Michael Greenhalgh describes how a masterpiece of fifteenth-century Italian art was for a long time used as an ashtray, only to pass into the national collections.

John Stocks Powell describes how conflict between Nationalists and Unionists was still unhealed when the First World War began.

‘Unwearied in the office of friendship’, all his life Crabb Robinson was devoted to men of genius and faithfully recorded their behaviour, as Joanna Richardson here discusses.

Priest, poet and journalist, Blanco White escaped from Spain in 1810. Martin Murphy describest his last thirty years, spent in London, Oxford, Dublin and Liverpool.

Prudence Hannay recounts the life of the Bostonian who first set sail for Britain in April 1815. Ticknor would go on to pay his homage to and became the good friend of many European intellectuals. Among those he met were Byron, Scott, Goethe, Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael.

As advocate, diplomatist and historian, writes Neil Ritchie, Aeneas Silvius was a much-travelled international figure before he became Pope.