Political

England's answer to Charlemagne, or merely a ruthless king of Mercia? Simon Keynes sifts the evidence for a verdict on the man best known today as the builder of a dyke.

David Kirby discusses how Sweden's sudden rise to prominence in 17th-century Europe provoked much soul-searching both within and without the country on its nature, its culture and its destiny.

Bernard Crick looks at the cost of historical mediations.

'In my Father's house there are many mansions'... but whether or not they could accommodate Gandhi and Hindu nationalist aspirations was a question that exercised British theologians and Christian politicians between the wars. Gerald Studdert-Kennedy charts the relationship between them and the apostle of non-violence against the British Raj.

Conrad Russell asks if England has ever had a revolution.

The brutal war to maintain white supremacy in what is now Zimbabwe eventually led to the rule of Robert Mugabe.

Embittered Huguenot whose policies went hand in hand with repression of Catholics in William III’s Ireland or enlightened instigator of a unique French enclave which contributed to the 18th-century Ascendancy? In the summer which sees the tercentenary of the Battle of the Boyne, John Stocks Powell looks at the fortunes of Portarlington and its founding father.

'Gaul in three parts' - Charles Giry-Deloison discusses how new scholarship is affecting our view of a fifteenth-century triangle of power and diplomacy in Northern Europe.

In 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain took the helm of a humiliated France. While Vichy endured, many took his silence as evidence of grand strategy – a view bolstered by the client press.

'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.