Cultural

After the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth, writes M.L. Clarke, Rome became a centre of her enemies, and every English traveller was apt to be regarded with suspicion.

Plants have been hunted since the days of the Pharaohs, writes William Seymour; but, in more recent times, two resolute Scottish botanists led particularly adventurous and courageous lives.

In 1764, writes Stuart Andrews, during his successful Grand Tour, James Boswell, then aged twenty-four, visited two great European thinkers, who were, he wrote, far more interesting to him ‘than most statues or pictures’.

Nora C. Buckley describes how a soldier from the Azores became a Jesuit priest in India and how his extensive travels proved that ‘Cathay’ was in fact China.

A.L. Rowse pays tribute to the founding editors of History Today magazine.

J.P. Harthan describes The Salisbury Book of Hours; compiled in Rouen about 1425, the prayer-book owes its name to one of the best English commanders in France.

Philip E. Burnham Jr. describes how the court of Clement VI at Avignon became a model of humanism and scholarship for princely courts elsewhere in Europe.

Joanna Richardson describes how the volumes of the Goncourts Journal record the intelligent scene in late nineteenth-century France.

At a time when the Turkish rulers of Greece were conducting a profitable trade in ancient statues, Charles Fellows, an enlightened English tourist, rescued a precious hoard from Asia Minor. By Sarah Searight.