History Today

A man of obsessions, a passionate racialist with a romantic belief in the virtues of the ‘sturdy peasant farmer’, Quisling ruled war-time Norway as a devoted pupil of the Nazi government.

W.J. Reader describes a scandalous episode that arose out of the transfer of authority in India from the East India Company to the Crown.

Geoffrey Warner describes a politically polarising event which would later influence the formation of French fascism and the Vichy state.

“We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order” announced Lenin to the Congress of Soviets early on the morning of November 8th, 1917. He had prepared no blueprint from which to work, and forty years later, writes Ernest Bock, the structure of the Soviet state is very different from that which its founder envisaged.

Christopher Sykes describes how the last Tsar of Russia, as well as Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites, were among those taken in by this spurious publication.

‘Man has made himself what he is today.’ Joe Rogaly writes how important biological changes have recently transformed his whole existence.

At Oxford, in 1833, writes K. Theodore Hoppen, a group of earnest reformers set out to infuse new spiritual life into the Established Church.

Nicholas Lane recounts the story of marine insurance, from coffeehouse days to worldwide fame.

Robert Knecht revisits an article marking 400 years since the assassination of Henry III of France and asks why the last Valois king has attracted so little attention from English-speaking historians.