This edited article about W M Thackeray originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 257 published on 17 December 1966.

Becky Sharp famously throws Dr Johnson's Dictionary out of the carriage at the beginning of 'Vanity Fair'

The small, pale-faced boy felt lost and bewildered as he stood amidst the rush and bustle of the quayside at Calcutta, in India. He was about to embark on the most thrilling journey of his short life, the voyage to his ‘home’ in England – a country he had heard so much about, but never seen.

Five-year-old William Makepeace Thackeray was not excited at the adventure before him. He was sad to be leaving his widowed mother and his relatives and friends. He missed his pet monkey, who was not allowed aboard the three-decker ship, Prince Regent.

William’s father had been an important official of the East India Company, but the harsh climate of India had never really suited him, and he had died early in 1816. Mrs. Thackeray had decided to send William to live in London with his Aunt Charlotte Ritchie, so that he didn’t suffer unnecessarily in the cruel Indian sun. His mother was going to marry an army captain, and she promised William that she would come to England after her marriage.

So, in December, 1816, William set sail. He was accompanied by his cousin, Richmond Shakespear, aged four, and a trusted Indian servant. As his mother waved the ship out of sight, she little knew that William was to become the foremost writer of his day.

On the voyage home boatloads of passengers from the Prince Regent visited the Atlantic island of St. Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte had been imprisoned in 1815. The infamous ‘Boney’ was said to eat children alive. William persuaded Lawrence Barlow to take him to Napoleon’s garden, where they saw a short, worried-looking man pacing feverishly to and fro, hands clasped behind his back.

William won the admiration of everyone on the Prince Regent by sketching the Little Emperor in his garden jail. His drawings, however, were not conventional portraits. They were caricatures showing a midget Napoleon almost hidden by giant-sized guards. It was this talent for clever exaggeration that was to gain William more praise – and also land him in trouble!

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This edited article about Roman Catholicism originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 249 published on 22 October 1966.

Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More by Ron Embleton

On ceremonial occasions, the Pope is preceded in procession by the cardinals, resplendent in their red robes. The Pope is borne along on his throne by the Papal Guards, and thousands of people throng the route to see the Pope and receive his blessing.

Cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church are like princes in a kingdom. They make up what is known as the Sacred College of Cardinals.

The cardinals form the Pope’s council. When a Pope dies, they meet ‘in conclave’ to elect a new Pope from amongst their own number, and during the vacancy they have to direct administrative matters and watch over the interests of the Church.

Bishops and archbishops are elevated to the College of Cardinals by the Pope. The number at any given time in the past has varied greatly, ranging from below 20, but not as a rule being above 70. The last Pope, John XXIII, and the present one, Paul VI, have increased the number, so that since 1965 there have been 100 or more, the highest number ever.

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This edited article about Otho and Vitellius originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 800 published on 14th May 1977.

Marcus Salvius Otho, briefly Roman Emperor in AD 69

As General Marcus Otho looked into the lifeless eyes of his old friend Servius Galba, whose severed head had been brought to him spiked on a private soldier’s spear, it must have seemed to him that his troubles were nearly over. At least he could now be called the Emperor of Rome.

That was a title Otho wanted more than anything else in the world – not, strangely, for the power it would bring, but for the money. For Otho was nearly bankrupt.

The reason was that he had spent most of the past 20 years literally buying his way up the social ladder of Rome. He had thrown colossal banquets, given magnificent presents to important people. When it seemed more and more evident that he was a likely candidate for the Emperor’s throne, he spent even larger sums, gambling on getting the job and clearing off his debts at the Roman taxpayer’s expense.

Then the new Emperor Galba, who had been Otho’s long-standing colleague in governing the Roman province of Spain, had dropped a bombshell. Instead of naming Otho as the heir and successor, as Otho had confidently expected, he named instead an inexperienced nobleman, Lucius Piso.

Otho was flabbergasted. He had risked everything on following Galba, who was 73 and highly unpopular, to the Emperor’s throne. “I might as well fall to an enemy in battle as to my creditors in the Forum,” he had once remarked with disarming candour. Now it looked as if he were really going to fall . . .

Bitterly resentful at what Galba had done. Otho used his last remaining cash to bribe some of the officers under his command to raise the standard of revolt. He felt confident that once they had let it be known that a revolution had started against Galba, many soldiers would join in, and he was right.

Galba still didn’t know what was happening and had as yet no reason to suspect his friend when Otho appeared at the Emperor’s side, as he usually did, while a sacrifice to the gods was made. During the ritual a messenger arrived and whispered to Otho: “The surveyors have arrived.” This was a secret signal that enough troops were on his side, and Otho excused himself to the Emperor, saying that some men had come to see him about a house he was buying.

Otho went off in a closed sedan chair, “like those used by women,” carried by two bearers. When the bearers began to get tired the general got out and ran. He had almost got to his camp when he had to bend down and tie his shoe-lace. It was then that some of the thousands of soldiers, who had been recruited to back him as Emperor, rushed out and, lifting him on their shoulders, proclaimed him as ruler of Rome.

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This edited article about London originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 764 published on 4th September 1976.

The riot of the Apprentices in 1517, after which Catherine of Aragon interceded with King Henry on their behalf (inset). Pictures by Clive Uptton

“London, thou art the flower of cities all!” The poet William Dunbar was clearly impressed. He had come down from Scotland with his master, the Scottish Ambassador, for a Christmas Day feast at the Lord Mayor of London’s palace in 1501.

Other foreigners were not quite so sure. Only four years earlier, an Italian business man had got a poor reception. “Londoners have such fierce tempers and wicked dispositions that they not only despise the way in which Italians live, but actually pursue them with uncontrolled hatred. They look askance at us by day, and at night they sometimes drive us off with kicks and blows of the truncheon.”

Unfortunately it was true that Londoners did go in for a lot of anti-foreign riots, insults and sometimes murder. Sometimes things really got out of hand, as on the ‘Evil May Day’ of 1517. Young apprentices of London had been bullying foreigners for months. The city aldermen decided to have a curfew on May Day night. But the youngsters had been looking forward to letting of steam on May Day, and they simply refused to go indoors when the bells tolled. Instead they attacked one of the city fathers. A riot started, windows were broken and King Henry VIII decided that the Mayor and Corporation had lost control. In his opinion, these rioters were committing treason by assaulting foreigners who were under the King’s personal protection.

Cannonballs were fired from the Tower of London into the city and some apprentices were arrested. On May 4th, thirteen of these “poor younglings” were executed, much to the horror of all London. As the Venetian Ambassador put it: “This has been a great commotion, but the terror was greater than the harm.”

London’s urban government was breaking down in the face of problems that would daunt even the modern Greater London Council. Things really got bad when huge areas of England were fenced off for sheep pastures, forcing peasants to go to the cities in search of a new life. Their numbers were later swollen by refugees from religious persecution in Europe, and London’s population soon rose to 200,000. Most had to live outside the city wall. This meant that they were generally outside the city’s control as well, and ghastly slums started to appear. Homeless, starving people became a threat to those lucky enough to have work. These included redundant soldiers, peasants driven from the land and, after King Henry VIII had got rid of the monasteries, hundreds of monks and nuns, who had been left to beg in the streets.

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This edited article about Jan Bozdech and Antis the Alsatian originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 716 published on 4 October 1975.

A spitfire in a dogfight with German fighters during an air raid

Air Gunner Bozdech and his pilot, Pierre Duval, were shot down over the area of no man’s land between the French Maginot Line and the German Siegfried Line on 12th February, 1940. As they picked their way through the shelled ruins of a deserted farmhouse, Jan suddenly had the feeling that they were being watched. He was right. In the centre of what was once the farm kitchen the keen eyes of a young, orphaned Alsatian were cautiously observing their every move.

Jan fondled the animal which had now overcome its initial suspicion of the two strangers. “We can’t leave him here” he said, and he tucked the small pup into his flying jacket for protection.

Jan and Pierre made their way back to the French lines and, with the help of his fellow Czechoslovakians who were serving with the French Air Force, Jan decided to call his new friend Antis after the A.N.T. bombers used by the Czech Air Force. Antis became so devoted to his master that he went aloft with him during sorties, lying contentedly at Jan’s feet through even the thickest of raids.

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This edited article about conservation of buildings originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 712 published on 6 September 1975.

Buildings found in the open air museum include a rebuilt granary (top); Titchfield market hall (left); Catherington tread-wheel (right); Bayleaf House (middle); Beeding Toll House (bottom)

‘An Englishman’s home is his castle,’ we say. And this applies to Scottish and Welsh people, too, for their castles have been their homes, perhaps for eight or nine centuries. But these are stone-built fortresses, like Alnwick, Berkley, Caernarvon and Glamis. Because they were constructed of the most enduring materials, they have survived. Ordinary folk, however, lived in houses of brick in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before that, most houses were timber-framed, with ‘wattle-and-daud’ – rough plasterwork stuck on to laths and split hazel wands and the like as infilling.

Brick-built houses stand up well to time and weather. Timber-built ones, if oak was used and the craftsmen knew their job, also stood the test of time. But not many of them date back beyond the sixteenth century. As for the humbler homes, with poorer quality timber and rough plaster, these have survived less well. Rafters collapse, rain pours in, and soon the whole building is in ruins.

In recent years, conservationists (people who feel it to be important to save such buildings), have undertaken the task of locating many of these humbler dwellings and restoring them. Sometimes this has been possible where they stood. In other cases, when site-development or road-widening has threatened them, they have been skilfully dismantled and removed, often over quite long distances, to a new site, and there lovingly restored.

At Singleton in West Sussex, for instance, is the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. Not a museum in the usual sense, but some forty acres of meadowland and woodland on which you can wander about and examine a wide range of domestic buildings that have been brought here and re-erected from their original sites in Hampshire, East Sussex, Surrey and Kent. Where necessary, they have been restored with matching timbers so that they can be seen in very much the condition they were in when they were first built.

You will be surprised at the wide variety to be seen. Though it is only ten years since the idea was first put forward, and the site has been open to the public for only four or five years, nearly twenty buildings, large and small, have been assembled. Within the next few years, that number may well have doubled.

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This edited article about art originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 888 published on 27 January 1979.

Renoir at the notorious Impressionist Exhibition by Andrew Howat

“This exhibition is the work of lunatics,” howled an art critic. “These pictures are fit only for wallpaper,” cried another. Their scorn was typical of the reaction aroused by the work of a group of young artists, soon to be known as the Impressionists, when it was first put on public view in 1874. Time has proved the critics wrong, for the Impressionists’ paintings are so valuable today that only a billionaire could buy them all.

However, at the time, they aroused a great scandal. The Parisian public expected realistic people in pictures, preferably pictures that told a story. Instead, they found themselves staring at pictures in which artists were obsessed with light and with the colours in shadows.

Some of the names in that exhibition are now immortal – Monet, Cezanne, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley and Renoir. These men saw, like their friend Manet who did not exhibit, things as they were at a fleeting moment. Certain painters before them, such as Constable and Turner, had also done this. If Monet saw hills that in the distance looked blue, he painted the blue. Yet in the 1870s other artists always painted hills green.

The Impressionists worked fast, in the open air, something which was unheard of then. Monet would paint the same scene at various times of the day to catch the different lights which transformed it. Form for him and his friends became less important than atmosphere and light. They found that shadows were not black but were different shades of the substance on which they fell.

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This edited article about sport originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 876 published on 28 October 1978.

Dignified applause from thousands of Japanese salutes a huge, paunchy man who weighs about 140 kilos. Standing triumphantly in the centre circle of hardened clay, he has just won a bout of sumo in one of the Grand Tournaments held yearly in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka.

Sports from abroad have been adopted in Japan, but none has affected the loyalty to the extraordinary art of sumo, which dates back nearly 1,800 years.

The first sumo match appears to have been performed before the Emperor Suijin in AD 200, and by the 8th century there were regional and national championships. Professionalism was introduced about four hundred years ago, when the rules were standardised in almost the same form they take today.

Sumo bouts are held indoors. A sumo pavilion has rows of high-priced seats overlooking the ring on all sides. The cheaper “seats”, at ground level, are simply rush mats on which the spectators squat cross-legged.

The ring is a clay platform, and in its centre there is a large circle of sand. The sumo wrestlers, enormous and pot-bellied from years of deliberate training for weight and overdevelopment of muscle, aided by the over-consumption of a high-protein stew, wear nothing but loin-cloths.

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This edited article about animals originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 854 published on 27 May 1978.

Gorilla by Susan Cartwright

Deep in the great, gloomy African forests lives the mighty giant of the ape tribe – the gigantic gorilla.

Twice as heavy as an average man and equally as tall, with arms that can span nearly three metres, the massive gorilla looks so terrifying that lions and leopards keep away from it.

Especially fearsome is its terrifying habit of drumming its chest with both hands, as if preparing for a devastating attack, and giving out a terrific roar.

Yet nothing could be more deceptive. Although it looks extremely fierce, a gorilla is not naturally aggressive.

It does not prey on other animals but feeds on shoots and fruit.

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This edited article about cars originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 823 published on 22 October 1977.

The Black Sheep Bentley by Graham Coton

In the world of ‘vintage’ and ‘veteran’ motor cars, the name of Bentley holds an honoured place, and proud owners of the comparatively few cars that remain in the world with that famous name care for them as if they were members of their families.

W. O. Bentley was an enthusiast who was fascinated by automobile engineering before World War I, but it was in 1919 that he designed a classic sports car which set a standard for high quality in engineering and the materials used. To make sure that his cars were always built to these high standards, Bentley gathered round him the very best craftsmen he could find, and virtually every car was hand-built.

Bentley’s dream was to make a sports car that was not only fast and safe, but the best in its class, and he succeeded. Because they were all built so carefully, they were inevitably expensive, and output was very low compared with the factories of today which churn out cars by the thousand evey week.

In fact, the firm of Bentley Cars built only just over 3,000 cars during its eighteen years existence. The company was absorbed by Rolls-Royce in 1931, and the name lives on in Rolls-Bentley cars. About 300 of the original Bentleys are still running today.

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