Social

Colin Davies describes how, in the 6th century B.C., Miletus became the birthplace of Western science and philosophy.

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.

Kenneth Woodbridge describes the letters of Sir Richard Hoare, Banker, Goldsmith and Lord Mayor of London, to his sons.

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.

G.W.S. Barrow tells the story of a twelfth-century London student in revolt.

Stephen Usherwood shows how Rembrandt’s genius gives a vivid impression of 17th-century Holland.

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

A.L. Rowse analyses heraldry as an essential element in the social history of England in the later middle ages and early modern period.

In the early eighteenth century, writes Robert Halsband, the marriage of an aristocratic young widow and a Drury Lane singer caused violent surprise among her friends.

H.A. Monckton offers a taste of the beer of Elizabethan England, a beverage reportedly, ‘dark in colour, not very heavily hopped, and probably rather sweet and vinous’.