What he had always wanted to be, Talleyrand wrote in later life, was “the man of France”—not the representative of a party, a political system or a sovereign master. Does this ambition, asks Harold Kurtz, explain his various changes of allegiance, including his “betrayal” of Napoleon, for which many French historians cannot forgive him?
John Terraine describes how democracies evolved and tried to carry out a grand strategy from 1861-1945.
The manner in which the Great War was fought after 1916, writes John Terraine, has decided the nature of the century we live in.
J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.
A century ago, writes Patrick Renshaw, Karl Marx and his colleagues founded in London the first International Workingmen's Association, a body from which many varieties of socialism and communism have since developed.
W.J. Fishman describes how Lenin adopted Tkachev's maxim: “to destroy Tsarism now and to establish the Socialist society before Capitalism took root.”
In deciding on the Reoccupation of the Rhineland, writes D.C. Watt, Hitler said that he went forward “with the assurance of a sleepwalker...” His practical calculations proved to be “entirely justified.”
During the last grim stages of the Napoleonic struggle, writes Jane Aiken Hodge, a gay young Englishman and his genial employer made an adventurous journey around Europe.
Christopher Sykes describes how the last Tsar of Russia, as well as Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites, were among those taken in by this spurious publication.
How a resounding British victory convinced the German military leaders that they had lost the First World War.
