Issue 26 December 1996

Previewing his forthcoming biography, Robert Knecht argues that recent whitewash has failed to cover guilty blood.

Malcolm Crook takes a fresh look at the eighteenth-century alliance between philosophers and kings.

Kenneth Baker argues that cartoonists have let recent Prime Ministers off lightly compared with their eighteenth-century predecessors.

Presentation of the past as a seed-bed of modernity gives it bogus relevance to modern concerns. Two hundred and fifty years after the battle of Culloden Jeremy Black looks at a classic instance – the military challenge of the Jacobites.

W A Speck looks at new thinking about the emergence of whigs and tories.

In the second instalment of a two part article, Roger Eatwell chooses between rival definitions of a slippery word

Frank McDonough looks at recent thinking on the origins of the war of 1899-1902

Raphael Mokades - the winner of the 1996 Julia Wood Award - argues that military failure in the Boer War transformed political attitudes in Edwardian Britain.