Britain

Kenneth Baker argues that cartoonists have let recent Prime Ministers off lightly compared with their eighteenth-century predecessors.

Presentation of the past as a seed-bed of modernity gives it bogus relevance to modern concerns. Two hundred and fifty years after the battle of Culloden Jeremy Black looks at a classic instance – the military challenge of the Jacobites.

W A Speck looks at new thinking about the emergence of whigs and tories.

Robin Bruce Lockhart celebrates the past and present of the immortal dram and its historic links with our seasonal festivities at Christmas and New Year.

Frank McDonough looks at recent thinking on the origins of the war of 1899-1902

Raphael Mokades - the winner of the 1996 Julia Wood Award - argues that military failure in the Boer War transformed political attitudes in Edwardian Britain.

Dauvit Broun looks at the making of a nation, 1000-1300, which formed a crucial element in the shaping of medieval Britain.

Why the 1815 Corn Laws were necessary, and why circumstances conspired to force the repeal of 1846.

Bernard Porter argues that the 'End of Empire' unravelled British domestic politics as well as her international outlook.

Edmond Halley was far more than a man who watched comets. His adventures aboard HMS Paramour represent one of the earliest voyages of purely scientific discovery.