History Today

At the age of twenty-one, in 1826, Disraeli published his first novel, Vivian Grey. Robert Blake describes the long career that lay before him, in which romantic politics and political romances were brilliantly blended.

With Nelson dead at the Battle of Trafalgar, vice-admiral Lord Collingwood took command. It was the tragic conclusion to a friendship that began decades earlier.

Asa Briggs reflects on two Victorian radicalists who employed controversial new means to secure power, drawing both fervent disciples and bitter enemies, before their eventual defeat as part of a reaction against the ideas and methods of the 1840’s.

Throughout the years of Chinese self-questioning in the second half of the nineteenth century, Tz’u Hsi, the Empress Dowager, held the stage, untouched by the new thought. By Richard Harris.

Dorothy Carrington describes how two citizens of Corsica, both of whom, in the Corsican tradition, aspired to political advancement, conducted a lengthy vendetta that had a decisive effect on the history of Europe.

Charles James Fox has been presented as the prototype of the nineteenth-century Liberal. Certainly his gifts were extraordinary. But did he put them to a worthy use? Ian R. Christie critically re-examines his record of public service.

Before the triumph of Bolshevism, and even afterwards, many revolutionary leaders struggled to take charge of Russian destinies. David Footman describes how Savinkov was one of the extraordinary personalities who tried, and failed.

In the summer of 1849, Austrian forces besieging Venice decided to put into practice a novel plan; Europe had its first experience of aerial warfare.

In producing the complex of events that was to lead the Southern States from Union to Confederacy, Peggy Eaton – aggrieved wife of President Jackson's Secretary of War—played a small, but curiously dramatic, part. 

Philip Thody critically re-examines both the record and his legend of this attractive ill-fated young man, the most fashionable of French revolutionary heroes.