Interwar period

Frank McDonough reviews the debate over Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy.

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.

A 17-day political dogfight at the 1924 Democratic National Convention revealed the faultlines in American society, from prohibition to Protestantism to the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan.

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.

By the late 1920s, Stalin and the Soviet Union seemed on the road to totalitarianism. Did the system spawn a monster – or a monster the system? 

Milton Goldin compares American philanthropy past and present.

'A life of action and constant fidelity to a set of ideas': Max Beloff takes a fresh look at the career of Leo Amery with the publication of the latter's second volume of diaries – a man by no means the stereotype of an inter-war Conservative politician.

The Xi'an Incident, a tragi-comic sequence of mutiny and kidnapping, marked a crucial stage in the struggle between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists.

Buying and selling with our 'kith and kin' was the hallmark of an intensive inter-war campaign for the idea of Empire.