Political

E.E.Y. Hales profiles Pope Pius IX (1846-78), who saw the end of the Papacy as a temporal power as the opening of a new era in its world-relationships.

H.T. Dickinson introduces a Bishop who held many liberal views,  and was much disliked by his brethren.

For a few years an impoverished barrister became one of the most effective orators and journalists of the French Revolution, writes John Hartcup.

Douglas Hilt profiles a statesman, jurist and man of letters who devoted his generous gifts to the service of Bourbon Spain.

Joanna Richardson finds that Anatole France's politics, like his private life, remained unorthodox, but the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s changed his literary life.

Louis C. Kleber profiles the tenth President of the United States, 1841-5, who survived a charge of impeachment and acquired Texas.

Derek Severn explains how the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, spent his final ten years as a prisoner of state in Denmark.

David Woodward describes how, throughout the First World War, the King remained on the narrow strip of Belgium between Ypres and the sea which remained in Allied hands.

W. Bruce Lincoln explains how Russian terrorists decided that ‘by the will of the people’ the Tsar Alexander II must be assassinated.

The gifted third son of the last Victorian Prime Minister was described as having ‘one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the League of Nations’, as his descendant, Hugh Cecil, finds out.