History Today

Pamela Tudor-Craig tours the cathedrals of the Kremlin.

Michael Diamond discusses what popular songs and singers had to say about Britain's politicians in the 1880s and 1890s.

Pious nobleman or calculating humbug - what is the true characterisation of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester? Simon Adams sifts the motives for the patronage given to some of Elizabeth's sternest religious critics by her favourite courtier.

The author of a 4000-year-old hymn to one God has been portrayed as a mad idealist who turned the civilisation of the pharaohs upside down. John Ray discusses the man and his myth.

Bruce Nelson traces how the magic of FDR and his practical social programmes welded American labour to the Democratic Party, and discusses the tensions that eventually weakened that union.

Solidarity forever? Not by 1951, Robert Zieger argues, when the visit of one of American labour's great heroes to a celebratory rally at a Ford Motors complex near Detroit revealed just how deep the split between old- and new-style unionism had become.

Irrational chauvinists or fearful protectionists? Gordon Daniels looks at the new research and arguments reshaping our view of Japan's rulers before and after Pearl Harbour.

He may have crystallised our image of the Victorian Christmas, but is there a Dickens for all our seasons? Raphael Samuel embarks on an investigation of how film and stage treatments of his work illuminated changing attitudes to the inheritance of 19th-century Britain.

Nancy Mitford takes a perceptive and ironic look at the reaction of 18th-century French 'society' to the Enlightenment's great philosophe. The author was one of the 'bright young things' who cut a dash in literary society between the wars, but then found more permanent fame through her elegant novels that displayed a sharp observation of class and

David Keys uncovers London's German enclave.