History Today

Fifty years ago a British film challenged widespread views on homosexuality and helped to change the law. Andrew Roberts looks at the enduring impact of Basil Dearden’s Victim.

There is nothing new or exceptional about the recent English riots and they will have little long-term impact, argues Tim Stanley.

William Beckford was the model of an 18th-century progressive and aesthete. But the wealth that allowed him to live such a lifestyle came from the slaves he exploited in his Caribbean holdings. Robert J. Gemmett looks at how an apparently civilised man sought to justify his hypocrisy.

Rachel Hammersley discusses how events in the 1640s and 1680s in England established a tradition that inspired French thinkers on the path to revolution a century later.

The 264 inhabitants of the island of Tristan da Cunha were evacuated to Cape Town on October 10th, 1961.

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility was first published in London by Thomas Egerton on October 30th, 1811.

One of the architects of the British Empire resigned on 5 October 1761.

The conquest of Java, now part of Indonesia, is one of the least known episodes of British imperialism. But this short interregnum influenced the governance of the Indian Raj and proved a significant stepping stone in the career of the founder of Singapore.

Having fled Hitler’s Berlin, Oscar Westreich gained a new identity in Palestine. He eventually joined the British army, whose training of Jewish soldiers proved crucial to the formation of Israel, as his daughter, Mira Bar-Hillel, explains.

The idea that the German foreign office during the Nazi period was a stronghold of traditional, aristocratic values is no longer tenable according to recent research, as Markus Bauer reports.