History Today

Past services cannot determine future policy. But, writes Brian Bond, the record of the Territorial Army suggests that the force has always given returns out of all proportion to the small amount invested in it.

From Roman times to the present age of American dominance, writes Brian Bond, philosophers, jurists and men of state have tried to answer the question: ‘When is war just?’

Ill-fed, badly lodged, subject to ferocious discipline, once described by their leader as “fellows who have all enlisted for drink,” Wellington’s soldiers showed a solidity and courage in action that enabled him to “do the business”. By T.H. McGuffie.

In the stormy history of the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus was buried, American intervention has followed upon Spanish, French and British. A survey of the scene since 1492.

The largest of African republics possesses an ancient and composite civilization, but the form that the country takes today owes much to two British colonial administrators.

Charles Chevenix Trench describes how an adventurous Greek in British Service played a large part in the trade and politics of the Horn of Africa.

The British attacked Copenhagen in August 1807 because, Canning claimed, Denmark was about to become a French satellite. Hilary Barnes asks, was he mistaken?

Napoleon returned to Paris in 1814 pledged to the concept of a liberal Empire. From the paradoxical experience of the Hundred Days, writes Harold Kurtz, sprang both the legend and reality of Bonapartism.

The Italian patriot’s visit to England was extraordinarily successful. But Queen Victoria deplored the scenes it provoked; and Karl Marx described them as “a miserable spectacle of imbecility”.

I.F. Clarke offers a study of the “pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war” as foreseen by imaginative writers and artists.