Cultural

Emerson: A Prophet Not Without Honour

Unlike everybody else in his generation, writes Arnold Whitridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson understood, loved and castigated the two different, but closely related, strains in American life and represented the national conscience.

Brady of Broadway

Thomas J. Brady offers a study of a fashionable photographer who became the great visual recorder of the American Civil War.

“Who Was Mrs Clarke?”

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, writes D. Pepys Whiteley, an easy-going Royal Duke was deeply embarrassed by the scandalous revelations of a discarded mistress, and by the publication of his private letters.

The Duke of Wellington's Books

Though the Duke did not pretend to be a highly educated man, he had a real respect for books, and made resolute attempts to supervise the education of his son and heir. By Elizabeth Longford.

The Abbé Dubois

Born on the banks of the Rhone, this enlightened French missionary was the first European to carry out a comprehensive survey of the manners and customs of the Hindus. Roderick Cameron describes how the book that he wrote, which he published with the encouragement of the British East India Company, remains a classic in its own field.

Sir Robert Peel: Patron of The Arts

“The son of a cotton millionaire scouring the auction rooms of Europe and building lavishly in the latest architectural style,” the Tory leader was a highly representative early nineteenth-century figure. By J. Mordaunt Crook.