Interwar period

Collaborators and Renegades in Occupied Shanghai

1930s Shanghai was notoriously populated by characters of dubious political and moral allegiances. Bernard Wasserstein shows how the Japanese used their contacts among the city’s low-life to assist in their invasion and occupation.

The Versailles Legacy

Derek Aldcroft argues that the statesmen of 1919 failed to act in the interests of Europe as a whole.

The Battle for Art in the 1930s

David Elliott looks at how Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler used culture to their own ends and how the ramifications of this has continued to the present.

Hitler and the Rhineland, 1936 - A Decisive Turning-Point

Hitler's march into the demilitarised Rhineland heralded Churchill's 'gathering storm' – but could the Fuhrer's bluff have been called and the Second World War prevented? Sir Nicholas Hederson, who as Britain's ambassador in Washington during the Falklands crisis saw diplomatic poker eventually turn to war, offers a reassessment of the events of 1936.

Sweet Charity

Milton Goldin compares American philanthropy past and present.