History Today

Stay-Behind Parties

M.R.D. Foot reveals the plans that were hatched fifty years ago to harry a would-be Nazi occupation of Britain by guerilla warfare.

Fatal Diplomacy, 1541

The murder of two French envoys on the river Po in the summer of 1541 not only provoked a diplomatic whodunnit round the courts of Europe, but also throws light on attitudes to diplomacy in the Renaissance world. Linda and Marsha Frey tell the story and its implications.

Arms and the Man: Abd El-Kader

Was one of France's most formidable opponents to its expansion in North Africa secretly aided and abetted by British guns? John King looks at a tangled tale of nineteenth-century Algeria.

Spain's Forgotten Naval Renaissance

Hearts of oak - but those of the Don, not John Bull. John Harbron argues for a revaluation of the expertise, both of men and materiel, which made Spain a formidable naval foe on the eve of Trafalgar.

The RAF on Screen 1940-1942

During the early days of UK involvement in World War II, official British films deliberately created a particular view of the air war, perhaps distorting our perceptions of some key phases.

France, Burgundy and England

'Gaul in three parts' - Charles Giry-Deloison discusses how new scholarship is affecting our view of a fifteenth-century triangle of power and diplomacy in Northern Europe.

Jansen and the Jansenists

Friends of truth or intellectual subversives undermining the authority of both Rome and Versailles? Alexander Sedgwick follows the story of how a theological argument about grace and freewill became enmeshed in the politics of seventeenth-century France.