As an integrated system of politics, economy and religion evolved in Europe around the year 1000, the figure of the Virgin Mary – so central to the lives of monks and nuns – became the core of a widely shared, though highly varied, European identity, says Miri Rubin.
Mark Rathbone asks why the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia emerged in the 1850s as the likely unifier of Italy.
Rowena Hammal explains why the United Provinces enjoyed a ‘Golden Age’ in the first half of the Seventeenth Century.
Reconciliation is not following in the wake of the search for truth about the past in one fomer Warsaw Pact country, Colin Graham reports.
Tony Chafer examines the paradoxes and complexities that underlie belated recognition of the contribution of African soldiers to the liberation of France in 1944.
Daniel Beer looks at how much Soviet labour camps owed to the theories of Russian liberals on crime, its causes and how to treat it.
Richard Wilkinson recreates the contest that marked, and marred, the British war effort in 1914-18.
Gabriel Ronay revisits the story of a Crown Prince’s suicide pact with his mistress and finds the evidence clearly pointing to murder.
Mark Bryant looks at the cartoons that adorned one of the Nazis’ most reviled newspapers.
Michael Simmons draws on many years experience of living in, and reporting from, central Europe to look back at the upheavals in Czechoslovakia of 1968.
