Literature

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.

During the first half of the thirteenth century, Matthew Paris recorded in words and drawings the events of world history. W.N. Bryant tells his story.

Mollie Gillen describes how Queen Victoria’s father was a bibliophile as well as a military commander and a colonial governor.

Theodore Besterman describes everyday life for “the polymorphic chameleon, the omniscient polymath.”

In the second century A.D. North Africa played an important role in imperial Roman life

F. Bastian finds that in composing his lively Tour, Defoe drew upon memories of journeys he had actually made and also upon the writings of earlier observers.

Michael Strachan introduces one of the most conspicuous members of this celebrated Jacobean drinking and dining club centred on the Mermaid Tavern in London; the eccentric ‘legstretcher’ Thomas Coryate.