Political

John Raymond profiles a man whose forbears had fought to win the Republic. Henry Adams, however, witnessed and testified to the birth of a nation.

J.H.M. Salmon describes how lust for power was the consuming motive of Marie de Médicis' life, but also how she failed to identify her personal ambitions with the symbolic meaning of the French crown.

British missions to the Chinese Court had already run into many grievous difficulties. When a mission was despatched to Burma, writes Mildred Archer, they found their problems no less irksome.

Early in December 1854, a group of miners, led by a hot-headed Irish rebel, defied the forces of the Australian Government. For many Australians, writes T.R. Reese, this gallant but hopeless gesture still symbolizes democracy’s unending struggle to preserve the freedom of the common man.

David Mitchell introduces a seventeenth-century politician who hoped to see the art of government reduced to an exact science, free from “the noise and dirt of party strife.”

Neville Williams profiles Thomas Howard, Fourth Duke of Norfolk (1538-1572), a great territorial magnate, commanding fanatical affection and wielding an influence that was little less than absolute.

C.V. Wedgwood recounts the circumstances the Earl of Arundel’s Embassy to Germany in 1636 as recounted in William Crowne’s Diary, the Earl’s letters and other contemporary sources.

Despite being denounced by Huxley as a man who used high gifts to discredit humble seekers after truth, David Newsome writes of how this Victorian prelate has also been acclaimed as the greatest bishop of his age.

J.P. Kenyon describes how, in 1688, there were weighty reasons to suppose that the new royal heir was a changeling, smuggled to the Palace in a warming pan.

During the years when France rose to predominance in Europe, writes J.H. Elliott, the Spanish Empire was governed by a man capable of gigantic designs, but lacking felicity in their outcome.