History Today

Prompted by news of a French defeat in 1809, the British Government launched an offensive expedition against the Low Countries which ended in gallant failure. By Anthony Brett-James.

Michael Srigley describes how, on November 30th, 1718, one of the foremost soldiers of the age was shot while besieging a fortress in Norway. Did he succumb to a stray bullet, or was he assassinated?

George Woodcock describes how, in opposition to Portuguese, Dutch and British intruders, the highland kingdom of Kandy in Ceylon flourished under a succession of Buddhist rulers almost until the year of Waterloo.

An interim appraisal, written by Alan Hodge, of the career of a Prime Minister who had just left office after nearly seven years in power.

E.G. Dunning finds that traditional football was a game with few rules, played riotously through the streets and across country. The nineteenth century saw its evolution on the playing fields of the public schools into the two main forms we know today.

I.F. Clarke describes how the eighteenth century saw the beginnings of popular predictive fiction that attempted, in terms of politics or science, to forecast the life of later centuries.

Joost Schouten was one of the ablest servants of the 17th-century Dutch East India Company, but he came a serious cropper when his fellow countrymen discovered his ‘crimes against nature’.

The entry of Turkey into the First World War may have extended the conflict by as much as two years. It certainly changed the country forever. Yet the advent of war was marked by confusion, uncertainty and shifting alliances, says Ian F.W. Beckett.

Benn Steil argues that John Maynard Keynes had an astute grasp of Britain’s debt situation in 1944 and how it might recover from ‘financial Dunkirk’. Yet his arrogance and ineptitude in negotiating with the Americans at Bretton Woods cost Britain dear and has had repercussions to this day.

The Dambusters Raid is one of the best known operations of the Second World War. But, as James Holland explains, the development of the ‘bouncing bomb’ took place against a background of bitter rivalry between the armed services.