Volume 62 Issue 1 January 2012

'Crisis? What crisis?' was Prime Minster James Callaghan's response to Britain's Winter of Discontent in 1979. However, he never actually said those words. A compendium of wrongly-attributed quotations.

The author of Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace (Faber & Faber), and presenter of the BBC TV series, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home discusses her work with Paul Lay.

Italian Fascist scouts meet a member of the Hitler Youth in Padua, October 1940: a picture explained by Roger Hudson.

David Torrance examines a pioneering article, first published in History Today in 1990, which argued that the Scottish Enlightenment was not restricted to Edinburgh but was a genuinely national phenomenon.

The black activist Malcolm X was not a civil rights leader. Nor was he a victim of the mass media. He was its beneficiary, in life and death, argues Peter Ling.

The designer of the Colt revolver, the most celebrated killing machine in the history of the Wild West, died on January 10th 1862, aged 47.

Frederick the Great, the man who made Prussia a leading European power, was born on January 24th, 1712.

The Maid of Orléans was born on January 6th 1412: she has been an incarnation of French national identity and pride for six centuries.

The poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and Coventry Patmore both subscribed to a Tory world view, fiercely opposing the reforms of Prime Minister Gladstone. But their correspondence reveals two very different personalities, says Gerald Roberts.

Simon Heffer argues that until relatively recently most historians have been biased in their efforts to harness the past to contemporary concerns.