The ascetic French philosopher Simone Weil spent the last months of her short life exiled in London working for de Gaulle’s Free French. But, her strange, austere vision for a France reborn after the tragedy of the Second World War was very different from that of the country’s future president.
The expulsion in 1609 of more than 300,000 Spanish Moriscos – Muslim converts to Christianity – was a brutal attempt to create a homogenous state.
The reasons why Charles I was executed are understood far better than the legacy of his death. Blair Worden considers the enduring and sometimes surprising consequences.
John Kirk charts the progress of the civil rights movement through its most prominent body, the NAACP.
Already rocked by defeats in the War of the Spanish Succession, Louis XIV’s France faced economic meltdown as the chaotic nature of its finances became apparent. Guy Rowlands discovers striking parallels with the current credit crunch as he charts the crisis that was to lead, ultimately, to the French Revolution.
Edna Fernandes visits a madrassa in northern India founded in the wake of the Indian Mutiny. One of the first Islamic fundamentalist schools, its influence has spread into Pakistan and Afghanistan, among the Taliban and followers of Osama bin Laden.
Mark Bryant on the work of Soviet cartoonists engaged in the epic struggle against Nazi Germany.
In his twenties, Philippe Maurice was sentenced to death by guillotine for murdering a policeman. Saved by a change of government, he transformed himself through prison study into one of France’s leading medieval historians. William Smith reports.
Andrew Roberts introduces the remarkable memoir of Magdalene De Lancey, wife of Wellington’s chief of staff, who accompanied her husband on a campaign that climaxed in triumph and tragedy.
John Shepherd looks back to the turbulent Winter of Discontent, which heralded the demise of James Callaghan’s Labour government and paved the way for Margaret Thatcher and eighteen years of unbroken Conservative rule.
