Britain

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writes Louis C. Kleber, the British came to America largely as settlers; the French as explorers and fortune-seekers.

From 1775 onwards, writes Mildred Archer, a succession of British officials delighted in the centre of Hindu religion and learning upon the banks of the Ganges.

In his youth hailed by Carlyle as a “new Mystic,” later acclaimed by his contemporaries as the “saint of rationalism,” John Stuart Mill was an extraordinarily versatile writer. Maurice Cranston profiles a man of very wide interests, who became the personification of Victorian liberal democracy and “the agnostic’s equivalent of a godfather” to the infant Bertrand Russell.

A manager of men and a master of contemporary politics, writes Esmond Wright, Dundas was Pitt's energetic colleague “during the most critical years in British history except for 1940”—not a hero, but a vigorous man of affairs who “rendered some service to both his countries.”

At the age of twenty-one, in 1826, Disraeli published his first novel, Vivian Grey. Robert Blake describes the long career that lay before him, in which romantic politics and political romances were brilliantly blended.

With Nelson dead at the Battle of Trafalgar, vice-admiral Lord Collingwood took command. It was the tragic conclusion to a friendship that began decades earlier.

Asa Briggs reflects on two Victorian radicalists who employed controversial new means to secure power, drawing both fervent disciples and bitter enemies, before their eventual defeat as part of a reaction against the ideas and methods of the 1840’s.

Charles James Fox has been presented as the prototype of the nineteenth-century Liberal. Certainly his gifts were extraordinary. But did he put them to a worthy use? Ian R. Christie critically re-examines his record of public service.

J. Garston describes how for eleven years, amid political and economic storms, first from Cologne and then from Wiesbaden, the British Army kept watch over the Rhine.

The long Allied occupation of France after Waterloo provides a striking example of how soon a country can return to normal; J. Garston explains how it also offers parallels and contrasts with the state of affairs in Germany today.