Cultural

John Gage gauges the impact of Italian influences trickling through to Britain until the 17th century.

Boyd Alexander profiles a man whose whole life and fortune were spent in creating and living out a youthful dream. But William Beckford was not only a romantic visionary: he was also an inspired collector and an artistic pioneer.

Far more interesting than Byron's romantic hero, who also inspired a celebrated circus act, is the real Mazeppa, as described in this article by L.R. Lewitter.

For nearly two hundred years Jesuit missionaries held a privileged position at the court of the Chinese Emperors, C.R. Boxer writes, where they laboured not only as fishers of men, but as astronomers, mathematicians, portrait-painters and skilful architects.

Peter Green meets the satirists of the Roman Empire, and is presented with a picture of a world in corruption and decline. Yet the Empire outlasted its bitterest critics by several hundred years.

D.M. Walmsley analyses the plentiful artistic and personal connections between the explorations of the Virginia company and the Bard.

Esther A.L. Moir meets the early English antiquaries— from William of Worcester to Sir William Dugdale—pioneers who laid the foundations of an important form of modern historical scholarship. Travelling up and down Great Britain, They kept a careful record of everything they heard and saw, investigating the monuments of the past and describing the landscapes of their own age.

Graham Dukes takes the reader on a visit to Amsterdam in her early modern heyday: a state within a state; a rich, self-assured, multicultural city, run by businessmen, for businessmen.

L.R. Palmer describes what we can learn of social stratification in ancient Greece from its epics.

George Charles Henry Victor Paget, the 7th Marquis of Anglesey, shares the stories behind the trip that his ancestor, the 1st Marquess of Anglesey, paid to the Court of Russia with his sons during the summer of 1839.