Volume 20 Issue 5 May 1970

Lenin and the Russian Revolution

It was Russia’s tragedy, writes Leonard Schapiro, that a greater man than Stalin supplied Stalin with the means to put his nightmare Utopia into practice.

The Battle of Kosovo, 1389

For Serbs the 1389 Battle of Kosovo was a physical defeat against the Ottoman Turks, but a moral victory that formed the backbone of Serbian national identity.

Hereward the Wake

Four years after William I's conquest of England, writes J.J.N. McGurk, a Lincolnshire thegn named Hereward led a fierce resistance movement against Norman rule.

Roger II, King of Sicily

This cultured but energetic ruler left behind him ‘a governmental machine that was the wonder and envy of Europe’.

Tulipomania

Stephen Usherwood describes how, in 1544, reports of a marvellous new flower, the tulip, first reached Western Europe, where it soon aroused a ‘fever of excited speculation’.