History Today

Public Disputations, Pamphlets and Polemic

Ann Hughes continues our articles on the Civil War period by investigating the controversies in public debate and the printed word that fuelled religious arguments before and after the Interregnum.

Rinuccini and Civil War in Ireland, 1644-49

Andrew Boyd tells the story of the ill-fated mission of a papal nuncio whose blundering zeal doomed the hopes of Irish Catholics of profiting from the civil war between Charles I and his Parliament in England.

Les Invalides, Paris

Douglas Johnson examines the powerful hold Les Invalides exercises over France's historical mythology.

Gruyere's Cheesemakers

David Birmingham draws on the private papers of an 18th-century Swiss cheese farmer to recreate a world whose business sophistication and economic arrangements cut across the context of the rustic joys of an Alpine lifestyle.

The February Revolution of 1917

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart had a distinguished career as a diplomat, writer and director-general of Churchill's Political Warfare Executive during the Second World War. But as a young diplomat and Acting Consul-General in Moscow, he was caught up in a chain of events that included being head of Britain's first mission to the Bolshevik Government, subsequent involvement in a plot to overthrow them, and imprisonment in the Kremlin - worthy of a novel by Le Carré.