Cultural

Neil Ritchie describes a pastoral race who flourished on Sardinia between 1500 and 500 B.C.. The Nuraghi have left us more than seven thousand finely built towers and a host of magnificent bronze figurines.

Francis Austen served throughout the Napoleonic Wars and, writes David Hopkinson, lived until the age of ninety-one; an Admiral of the Fleet.

J.H.M. Salmon profiles an important - but largely forgotten - historian of the ancien régime, whose main theme was expansion in Asia and in the New World.

J.S. Curtis charts the development of stringed keyboard instruments from the virginal and spinet, to the ‘forte-piano’.

During the 1730s, writes Michael Paffard, the modest and unassuming Duck achieved considerable fame.

Joanna Richardson profiles a figure who carried her Republicanism to the edge, though not across the border, of Socialism.

D.E. Moss introduces a Cambridge scholar who was tutor to Princess Elizabeth, an observant traveller in Germany and the author of books on archery and education.

Douglas Hilt introduces the scholar, innovator and agricultural reformer, Pablo de Olavide, who brought to Spain the ideas of the French Enlightenment.

When the founders of the American Historical Society discussed their plans in 1791, writes Elisabeth Linscott, they determined ‘to seek and find, to preserve and communicate’, the precious records of their country’s past.

G.R. Potter describes how one of the Reformers active in Berne during the early sixteenth century was also a painter and man of erratic genius.