Britain

From 1848 until 1867, writes E.R.R. Green, the romantic nationalists of Ireland, with strong backing from the Irish-Americans, conspired in vain to make their country an “Independent Democratic Republic.”

In the mid-nineteenth century, writes Roger Howell, the eminent historian of Spain, Mexico and Peru paid a most successful visit to the British Isles.

“He resigned.” Sir Winston Churchill has written of his father, “at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and he made no attempt to rally support.” By Robert Rhodes James.

Cyril Falls profiles perhaps the ideal soldier in war and, certainly, the ideal British Commander-in-Chief.

To the victors in the Ministerial Crisis of 1886 went twenty years of power, writes Robert Rhodes James, while to the loser there only remained a poignant struggle against denigration and disease.

Engineer, journalist, inventor, Herbert Spencer became one of the most influential prophets of the Victorian Age. J.W. Burrow describes how his Synthetic Philosophy was an encyclopedic attempt to construct a system of “unified knowledge,” in which the facts of Darwinian natural science were blended with transcendental metaphysics.

Robert Rhodes James analyses the controversy over Parliamentary procedure that helped to precipitate the General Election in which Gladstone went down to defeat.

 “I am a Jingo in the best acceptation of that sobriquet... To see England great is my highest aspiration, and to lead in contributing to that greatness is my only real ambition.” By Edgar Holt. 

An able and victorious commander in North America during the Seven Years War, Amherst three times refused to return to the scene of his triumphs. Rex Whitworth seeks the explanation of the Field Marshal's conduct.

Captain Boycott, whose name has added a word to the English language, was accepted as a symbol of the landlord class in troubled Ireland. By T.H. Corfe.