History Today

Robert Rhodes James profiles the man rivalled only by Gladstone as the most able politician and Parliamentarian of his time.

Hitler had taken enthusiastically to his years in the army during the first World War. D.C. Watt describes how, afterwards, the future führer worked with equal zeal — and served his political apprenticeship — as a propagandist for a Bavarian counter-revolutionary army group.

The conflagration of the Reichstag provided Hitler with a heaven-sent opportunity. But the theory that the Nazis had planned it themselves now appears to be entirely baseless.

The atmosphere of plot and intrigue that surrounded the last few years of the Third Republic, writes Geoffrey Warner, has given French right wing extremists a taste for armed conspiracy.

Through a succession of crises, writes Philip Windsor, including those of the Airlift and the Wall, the West has for seventeen years maintained an apparently untenable position in Berlin.

Elka Schrijver describes how the peace of Westphalia in 1648 marked the close of the Thirty Years’ War and the dawn of a new era for Europe.

Gradually the Chinese Nationalists prevailed over the provincial war-lords, but meanwhile, writes Henry McAleavy, the fatal breach occurred with the Communists.

Jan Read describes how, between 1830 and 1840, two very different English travellers each produced a vivid account of Spanish scenes and personalities.

Goya lived from 1746 to 1828; Douglas Hilt describes how the artist's vigorous work ranges in subject from Court-paintings to the misfortunes of Unreason and War.

In his long series of novels, Galdos presents a vision of Spanish history from Napoleonic times until the 1880s. By Douglas Hilt.