Political

The brutal war to maintain white supremacy in what is now Zimbabwe eventually led to the rule of Robert Mugabe.

Embittered Huguenot whose policies went hand in hand with repression of Catholics in William III’s Ireland or enlightened instigator of a unique French enclave which contributed to the 18th-century Ascendancy? In the summer which sees the tercentenary of the Battle of the Boyne, John Stocks Powell looks at the fortunes of Portarlington and its founding father.

'Gaul in three parts' - Charles Giry-Deloison discusses how new scholarship is affecting our view of a fifteenth-century triangle of power and diplomacy in Northern Europe.

In 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain took the helm of a humiliated France. While Vichy endured, many took his silence as evidence of grand strategy – a view bolstered by the client press.

'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.

When money for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists began to dry up in the late 1930s, he turned to novel schemes for fund-raising. James and Patience Barnes recount the intriguing story.

Juan Cole looks at the pacifist, prophetic and millenarian 'world religion' whose leader emerged from the social and political unrest of 19th-century Iran and whose followers have since been persecuted by shah and ayatollah alike.

Michael Diamond discusses what popular songs and singers had to say about Britain's politicians in the 1880s and 1890s.