Literature

Alexander Winston describes how, in the middle of personal troubles, Milton became an eloquent defender of Cromwell’s system of government.

Harold Kurtz analyses Spanish predominance in the sixteenth-century West Indies.

If the world were ruled by a single Christian monarch, peace and justice would prevail: such was Dante’s vision in the early fourteenth century, writes Robert F. Murphy.

Robert A. Draffan describes how contemporary reviewers of Jane Austen took a moralistic view of her heroines’ adventures.

No marriage has been documented so assiduously as that of Thomas and Jane Carlyle. Ronald Pearsall describes how a famous Victorian historian was the first who attempted to unveil its secrets.

When David Garrick, the most distinguished actor of his day, organised a splendid festival in honour of our greatest dramatist, writes Carola Oman, everything favoured him except the weather.

Jack M. Sasson reads the letters of Shamsi-Adad and describes his humanity, patriarchal wisdom and easy sense of humour.

‘The story of Charles XII,’ wrote Voltaire, ‘was entertaining; that of Peter instructive.’ A. Lentin describes a unique example of early modern Franco-Russian relations.

J.H.M. Salmon portrays two men of letters - François de La Rochefoucauld and Jean François Paul de Gondi - as mirrors to both each other, and to the seventeenth century French society they wrote about.

H.T. Dickinson describes how, in his best-known work, Bolingbroke sought to produce a cure for present-day ills by rehearsing the virtues of an imaginary past.