Interwar period

The Republic of Turkey is 100 years old. Built on the ashes of an old empire, what place is there for the Ottoman past in the secular state?

Mystery surrounds George McMahon who, having tried to assassinate Edward VIII, outed himself as an agent of a ‘foreign power’. Does the discovery of new Italian documents solve the puzzle or obscure it further?

After winning the biggest shooting prize in the Empire, Marjorie Foster joined the new pantheon of women making sporting headlines. On the eve of the Second World War, she had a new target in her sights: the War Office.

The wait for the outcome of Chamberlain’s mission to Munich and the looming spectre of another world war hung over Britain in 1938. Its impact was deeply felt.

Imperial Japan’s vast Asian empire became home to more than a million female settlers. Their voices are now being heard.

Despite popular misconceptions and its aristocratic origins, for part of its history opera was inextricably linked with popular culture – no more so than in the 1920s. 

In the interwar period, France and Germany worked towards an integrated Europe.  

Turkey has a long history of coups, but the failed İzmir plot to assassinate Atatürk in 1926 had a lasting impact. One foreign journalist recorded the reprisals that followed with admiration – which soon turned to fear.

Victor Silvester brought ballroom dancing to the masses and his enormous influence persists to this day in the TV show Strictly Come Dancing. Much less well known is his extraordinary career as a boy soldier in the Great War. Richard Hughes sets the record straight.   

French history since the revolution has been marked by promises of progress that end in bitter failure. The election of Léon Blum’s Popular Front in 1936 was one such example.