History Today

Geoffrey Chandler analyses the complex pattern of reasons why Greece became the arena where the first violent post-war trial of strength took place between Communism and the West.

Lady Margaret Douglas, a favourite of Henry VIII, negotiated the shady politics and shifting alliances of the courts of four Tudor monarchs. Leanda de Lisle tells the story of the ‘progenitor of princes’, whose grandson, James VI of Scotland, became the first Stuart king of England.

During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.

The recent killing of a French teenager by fascist sympathisers recalls the tensions and divisions of the 1930s, says Chris Millington.

Adrian Mourby welcomes the return to public view of the Habsburgs’ esoterica.

It is time to ditch the Blackadder view of history, says Gary Sheffield. Britain was right to fight Imperial Germany in 1914.

Richard Kennett calls on his fellow history teachers to embrace narrative. There is no better way to inspire the historians of the future.

The author of Whisky Galore played an active role in the Great War, experiencing both the horror of the Dardanelles in 1915 and the intrigues of wartime Athens. Yet his diplomatic ham-fistedness forced his premature exit. Richard Hughes explains. 

The persecution and execution of Jews in 15th-century Italy highlights the ambiguous attitudes of Renaissance intellectuals towards Jewish people, their beliefs and their historical relationship with Christian theology, as Stephen Bowd explains.

Church and State stood foursquare behind the superiority of man in seventeenth century England. It was only when a lady became a widow, writes Maurice Ashley, that a glorious opportunity for authority and freedom suddenly flooded in upon her.