Cultural

The Nok people of Nigeria were smelters of iron but also agriculturalists. The culture they founded may have a deep effect on the ancient history of Africa.

One of the most extraordinary impostors ever to appear in Europe, writes James R. Knowlson, afterwards became the devout and dignified old gentleman whose friendship Samuel Johnson valued.

A.L. Rowse introduces the legendary spirit whom generations of Cornish people heard roaring in the storm-winds. Jan Tregagle proves to have originated as an unscrupulous seventeenth-century steward.

Under the far-sighted rule of the Five Good Emperors, writes Anthony Birley, the Roman world enjoyed a period of unexampled prosperity and peace.

Ross Watson introduces Prince Eugene of Savoy; Marlborough’s companion in arms was not only a great soldier but also one of the most important patrons and collectors of his day; a modest man with a deep love of painting and architecture inspired by a strongly individual taste.

Charles Chevenix Trench explains how, from the reign of William the Conqueror until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poacher was restrained by savage penal laws.

A characteristic product of eighteenth-century liberalism, the twenty-eight volumes of French Encyclopedia are here reviewed and reassessed by John Lough.

Anthony Bryer describes how, from 1453 to 1923 the dream of a recaptured Byzantium and a resurrected Byzantine Empire continued to haunt the Greek imagination.

For nearly four hundred years the “Peaceful and Tranquil City” was the administrative centre of Japan, writes George Woodcock, and for more than a thousand years remained the home of the Japanese Emperors.

Alan Birch visits mid-nineteenth century Sydney, a city formally incorporated in 1842 after fifty-four years of rapid and dramatic development.