Military

Ann Hills on an institution dedicated to the history of the Red Crescent and Cross and a humanitarian approach to war.

To export the Revolution's benefits across Europe was the early hope of the French - but the unenthusiastic response from the liberated peoples rapidly soured the vision. Tim Blanning chronicles that descent from optimism to realpolitik.

In the years after the First World War, aviation became the most exciting form of transport, the spirit of a new age; but for French women, as Sian Reynolds explains, it was also a paradigm of their struggle for equality.

On the 50th anniversary of the end of Spanish Civil War, Michael Alpert chronicles the ebb and flow of battle between Republican and Nationalists.

'Sweet' Polly Oliver went to war to be with her lover, but there were many women for whom military life was an end in itself. Julie Wheelwright uncovers the career of one woman whose ambition was amply fulfilled.

Roy Macnab examines the ongoing debate on the two Frances of 1940 – epitomized on the one side by Petain and de Gaulle on the other – in the light of an heroic Cavalry stand against the German Blitzkrieg.

Ian Seymour looks at the involvement of Elizabeth I's astrologer in matters of state, and his diplomatic intrigues on the Continent on the eve of the Armada.

Anthony Goodman looks into the Scottish border culture.

Cultural cataclysm or merely a modification of an Anglo-Saxon status quo? Antonia Gransden looks at views, past and present, of the Norman conquest.

A separatist assembly of Federalist New England at the height of war-weariness provided precedence and philosophy for future defiance of the Union.