1985

Low birth rates have obsessed the French since their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, argues Richard Tomlinson.

It's a hundred and fifty years since Henry - disparagingly called 'Orator' - Hunt died and John Belchem argues that it is time his reputation as a vainglorious...

Roger A. Mason on the myths and power of Scotland's line of kings

Peter Burke discusses historical amnesia and cultural roots.

A rage for Mesmerism gripped society in London at the end of the eighteenth century, as it had in Paris and Vienna. But it was to be short-lived. The excesses of...

A Satanic conspiracy designed from the beginning to eliminate European Jewry? Or ad hoc responses aimed at replenishing Nazi zeal and producing convenient...

It is remarkable how quickly a region, whose peoples shared a long history and many aspects of culture, can be forgotten.

by D. P. Singhal

David Starkey visits the Lincoln Center for a night at the opera.

Michael Biddiss on the tale of a French village massacred by the SS in June 1944.

Kathleen Burk looks at the recent history weekend organised at Long Wittenham, a village of less than a thousand residents on the River Thames in south Oxfordshire....

by Tom Hartman and John Mitchell.

by Gillian Sutherland, in collaboration with Stephen Sharp

by R.B. Wernham

Owen Dudley Edwards reviews a biography of the famous 'whodunnit' author Agatha Christie, by Janet Morgan.

by Lawrence Stone and Jeane C. Fawtier Stone

by David M. Wilson

by Carolly Erickson

On 4th April 1944, Anne Frank wrote, 'I want to go on living even after my death!' Four months later, she and her family left for a concentration camp after...

Aristocracy, by Jonathan Powis. 108 pp. (Basil Blackwell, New Perspectives on the Past, £14.95 hardback, £4.50 paperback)

Asa Briggs reviews

Roy Porter explains how historians react to being misunderstood.

Douglas Johnson reviews

by Royston Lambert

Stephen Trombley on a title exploring the collecting instinct of the bourgeois in response to modernity.

Christian Hesketh examines a title based on an architectural survey of 23,000 sites.

Canna: the story of a Hebridean island, by J.L. Campbell. 301pp. (Oxford University Press for The National Trust for Scotland, hardback, £25)

by A.W. Brian Simpson

Eric Hobsbawm has recently been honoured with a second Festschrift, The Power of the Past, edited by Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick and Roderick Floud, an appropriately...

Edward Royle looks at the most relevant titles on the 19th-century working-class political movement.

The great frustration in visiting naval dockyard towns has always been that they keep their most exciting parts hidden from view behind unassailable walls.

In his actions and writings, Churchill made General Mackesy the scapegoat for the allied failure to recapture Norway in 1940. Was this a fair assessment? And why...

by Mark Girouard

Volume 1: Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England

Rene Elvin on a popular piece of German literature on historical fabrications, by an Englishman and never out of print since 1882.

John Palmer explores the new development of computerising the Domesday day book and what the effects will be.

Go to a dinner party with unknown academics and you might well come away with the idea that for diversion they read Dostoevsky and Kafka, sparing the occasional...

Long before Mussolini drained the Pontine Marshes, a Socialist Co-operative set to work reclaiming the land around Ostia at the mouth of the River Tiber.

by David Constantine

Early Latin America. A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil, by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz. 477 pp. (Cambridge University Press, £30.00 hardback...

The British Empire was the largest in the history of the world. Brian Lapping explains how the end of that Empire was charted for television.

Robin Gwynn examines the arrival of Huguenot French to England in the 17th century.

The accession of Henry Tudor to the throne of England in 1485, the Crown had been fought over by the great magnates. When Elizabeth I died 118 years later, the Crown...

Two new books on social history and superstition

What use can historians make of those diaries which politicians keep for posterity – and rush into print? John Campbell considers two viewpoints of the 1964-1970...

A spectre which haunts many historians, whether of art or of science, is the forgery.

Anniversaries are, by definition, a time not only for celebration but also for self-examination, for dimly gazing into the future as well as for happily recalling the...

Franco's traditional image has been as a canny neutral in the struggle between the Allied and Axis powers. But in 1940 his aspirations for an African empire drew...

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

David Cannadine raises questions about the transition from student life into the working world

Charles Townshend evaluates the judgement of General Gordon and the ill-fated British mission in the Sudan.

The Victorians glorified the hero Gordon of Khartoum. But the reality was considerably less clear-cut.

Alan Palmer provides a brief history of a princely residence from the Middle Ages.

Handel. The Man and His Music by Jonathan Keates. 346 pp. (Gollancz, £12.95).

Henry IV, by David Buisseret. 235 pp. (George Allen and Umvin, £18.50). France in the Age of Henri IV. The Struggle for Stability, by Mark Greengrass. 237pp. (...

G.R. Elton reviews a book by Jasper Ridley

Ronald Hutton on the many arguments propounded in the debate over nuclear weapons.

edited by J.F. Ade Ajayi and Michael Crowder

edited by David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin / by Tom Lodge

Two new books on influential figures in Georgian society

It may have lacked the newsworthy drama of the earlier acts, but the Reform legislation of 1884-85 wrought 'great organic changes in the British constitution',...

Three new collected essays and selected writings

Colin Holmes introduces a new series on the arrival of refugees and other foreigners to the country.

'I have been ostracised by my native country.... I am boycotted by my adopted country'. During the two world wars Germans in Britain found themselves to be enemy...

Personal experiences of the Second World War in Britain, how and why they should be used and what do they contribute to official histories of the conflict.

The continuing struggle in Ireland, and the atrocities which it produces within Great Britain, are given full attention by the media.

by Kenneth O. Morgan / by Henry Pelling

Widowed at the age of thirteen, three months before the birth of her only child, the devout mother of Henry VII showed herself a master of political intrigue in...

John Guy uncovers Tudor England's legal profession.

Gillian Goodwin on traditional recipes for Lent.

Alan G.R. Smith reviews a book edited by G.P.V. Akrigg

To historians he seemed to be a philosopher, to philosophers an historian. But in spite of the difficulty of categorising the late Michel Foucault (1926-84), or...

Richard Bessel outlines the new perspectives in this series on Nazi Germany.

by Margaret Aston

Francis Robinson explores words and language plundered from the sub-continent.

'Trappings of popery and rags of the beast'. Mince-pies, mummers, holly and church services all fell victim to a determined Puritan attempt to stamp out the...

Three hundred years ago, in 1685, the King of France, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, thereby denying French Protestants – the Huguenots – any role in his...

With government sponsorship and prodigious fieldwork, Elizabethan cartography reached heights unequalled elsewhere in Western Europe.

The Allied victory forty years on. May 7th, 1945, was VE Day in Europe: in the Soviet Union it was May 9th. John Erickson has recently returned from the USSR and here...

At the Boston Tea Party the Americans not only flouted the unpopular tax laws on tea imposed on the colony, they also retrieved the image of the Mohawk from the...

Francis Robinson on the collections and ornate palaces of the Top Kapi Saray museum in Istanbul.

Stephen Trombley on the Boilerhouse at the V & A

The building in which I work has a chequered past. One section was once a laboratory of physical chemistry; another, the old Cambridge Free School, whose hall still...

Irene Collins looks at two new books on the Napoleonic Era.

Pat Thane reviews the first volume of a biography of the Conservative statesman and Prime Minister.

Paul Preston expresses both a historic and a musical interpretation of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov.

Operation Willi. The Plot to Capture the Duke of Windsor, July 1940, by Michael Bloch. xiv + 264 pp. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £10.95).

Ivan Roots examines the latest offerings on the Tudor and Stuart period.

Biography is the most popular non-fiction genre published in Britain. At least, that is the impression one gets from reading the review pages of the Sunday papers....

Pillars of Monarchy: an Outline of the Political and Social History of Royal Guards, 1400-1984, by Philip Mansel. 207 pp. (Quartet Books, £18.50)

Good quotes are rare in the history of science. The striking utterances which scientists have managed to produce are often over-used.

A ballot-box 'revolution' made Hitler Chancellor of Germany. But political violence was the stock-in-trade consolidating Nazi power piecemeal throughout 1933...

Ian Kershaw reviews a book on the early years of Nazism.

Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960, by John M. MacKenzie. 277 pp. (Manchester University Press, £25).

Christopher Haigh outlines the historiography of the reign of the first Elizabeth.

Mark Kishlansky discusses the change for historians with the ever increasing use of computers.

Colin Platt on the Architecture of late Medieval Monastic Houses

Richard Bessel reviews a volume on Spanish historiography and the wars of the 1930s.

Simon Adams explores works on the two dominant European political ministers.

Mary Beard reviews this new work

New work on the ancient civilisation

A.J.G.Cummings explores Scotland's links with Europe from 1600-1800.

An obsession with Aryanism and eugenic theory was the catalyst for Nazi policies of repression and extermination against gypsies and other ‘asocials’ – the...

Kevin Shillington reviews.

In 1972 Albert Paul, a retired Brighton carpenter, produced a charming account of his childhood years for a local history society entitled Poverty, hardship but...

Paul Dukes reviews a book on the Soviet Depression experience.

R.S.J. Carland reviews two books on sport in the ancient world.

by Gabriel Gorodetsky

Simon Schaffer explores the occult.

It is a perennial joke amongst those returning from their holidays that the things they had most hoped to see on their journey were lost from view – closed, removed...

What made for a good king in the Middle Ages? This month John Gillingham argues the case for Richard I, next month Michael Prestwich considers Edward I, and in June,...

Henry Tudor defeated and killed Richard III in battle in August 1485. That much is certain. Colin Richmond, however, wonders how the battle was fought; what...

Stephen Usherwood reviews a book by Asa Briggs

by Graham Twigg

A Short Oxford History title on the rise and fall of the dominant imperial power.

Four viewpoints - one from its editor, three from reviewers - on the making of a major new historical encyclopedia.

David Stevenson looks at the three-kingdom state in the seventeenth century.

Andrew Sanders reviews.

by Alan G. R. Smith

Ian R. Mitchell reviews a work on Prussia by Gordon A. Craig.

V.G. Kiernan on a study of the dominance and decline of European power and world relations today.

by Darrell Bates

Dominic Lieven reviews a book on the First World War.

Francis Robinson reviews three books on the Arabs and the Crusades.

The medieval order of Teutonic Knights held powerful sway over the historical imagination of Germany until the Second World War. Why and how did this nationalist...

Book review by Philip Mansel.

Edward Acton reviews a literary recreation of the Moscow trials.

The History of the University of Oxford, Volume One: The Early Oxford Schools. Edited by J. I. Catto. 684pp. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £55.00).

Historic attachments to heroic leadership combined with a mastery of propaganda techniques to mesmerise Germany into acceptance of the charismatic authority...

Claire Cross reviews a book on the impact of the plague.

John Hiden reviews a book on Germany's 1936 occupation of the Rhineland.

In this article, Sheridan Gilley looks at the rich history surrounding Irish immigration abroad.

F.J. McLynn on a book dealing with the Scottish clans, particularly from 1688 to 1746.

'A re-banished Jewry weeping beside the waters of Modern Babylon'. Between 1880 and 1914 the mass exodus of Jews from Russia and Poland fled hunger and persecution...

by Trevor Royle

Stephen Porter reviews a book edited by R.N. Dore.

It was not only the Jews who fled from Tsarist persecution in the late 19th century. Immigrants from Lithuania came to Scotland en route for the United States and...

Readers of Zuleika Dobson will recall the occasion when Mr Pedby, the Junior Fellow, read grace. As they listened to the false quantities of his Latin, the occupants...

Protestant, martyr and anti-Catholic icon, prodigy of Renaissance learning, model evangelical schoolgirl, star-crossed lover, Hollywood heroine? Frank Prochaska...

by Jonathan D. Spence

Colin Holmes assesses racial violence in Britain from 1911-19.

Richard Bessel reviews about Christianity under the Nazi regime.

Competing interests as much as ideology fuelled the functioning of the Third Reich, augmented by forced labour and the plunder of Occupied Europe.

The legacy of empire brought nearly half a million blacks and Asians to Britain in the fifties in search of a better life.

by O. H. K. Spate

Duncan Shaw looks at how the entry of Spain into the EEC in 1985 furthered its process of integration into the European community. During the Franco years, the...

The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, edited by Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick & Roderick Floud. vi + 308 pp. (Cambridge University Press, £25)

by Elizabeth Eisenstein

by William Hunt

Tessa Murdoch on the exhibition charting the contribution made by the Huguenots to the national life of Britain.

Peter Burke considers the various works dealing with the Renaissance

by Anthony Arblaster

by Chris Given-Wilson & Alice Curteis

The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896-1914, by A.J.A. Morris. 495 pp (Routledge and Kegan Paul, £25)

Two new reviews

Harold Mytum reviews a book on a Viking excavation.

Editor Gordon Marsden rounds up what is to come in History Today, 1986.

Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642, by Martin Butler. xii + 340 pp. (Cambridge University Press, £25)

War is prominent among the forms of human experience that have most readily stimulated poetry. In combat both mind and body strain at the end of their tether.

Town, City, and Nation. England 1850-1914, by P.J. Waller. 339 pp. (Oxford University Press, £12,50).

Much Tudor art may not have been 'home-grown' but its form and subject matter tells us a great deal about England's 'natural rulers'.

In the early 1930s, when National Socialism became a mass movement, it drew strong support from the Protestant rural population. The emergence of the Third Reich...

For readers of this magazine the quality of the articles presented in its pages month by month will have provided, one hopes, ample evidence for the continuing...

by Richard A. Jackson

It used to be taken for granted that historians wrote narratives, but this is now a matter of debate.

by Harold Macmillan

War in the Middle Ages, by Philip Contamine. xvi + 387 pp. (Basil Black- well, £17.50).

Asa Briggs examines a well-balanced synthesis of the period.

Eight historians ask what constitutes diplomatic history.

History with the people left out? Arid quantification? Aggregate History? Or study of the essential motivating force of society? What is economic history? Six...

Jeffrey Richards answers

Dai Smith, senior lecturer at University College, Cardiff, offers his thoughts.

Stephen Yeo ends our discussion...

Six leading historians of science define their discipline.

Six leading historians of science define their discipline.

Putting women back in the record? Rewriting the past? Ghetto history? Gender analysis? Eight historians ask what is women's history?

W.J. Fishman reviews a book on key figures of the Nazi regime.

Peter Mellini reviews.

William's persistent determination to build an abbey on the exact site of his victory at Hastings underlines its importance as a symbol of the Norman Conquest....

Pauline Stafford reviews a book on medieval women.

Bruce Collins reviews a book on Victorian army wives.

Not all young Germans were enthusiasts for Hitler Youth ideas - and some actively opposed them.