Though the Decembrist rising against the Tsar was quickly put down, writes Michael Whittock, the officers and land-owners who led it created an heroic revolutionary tradition that influenced Russians of every class.
Asa Briggs reflects on two Victorian radicalists who employed controversial new means to secure power, drawing both fervent disciples and bitter enemies, before their eventual defeat as part of a reaction against the ideas and methods of the 1840’s.
“There is no analogy,” wrote Bury, “between the development of a society and the life of an individual man.” Martin Braun describes how Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin and others have sought to controvert him by arguing the case for the “Senescence of the West.”
Christopher Lloyd marks the tercentenary of Robert Black, Cromwell’s “General at Sea,” whose name ranks with those of Drake and Nelson in English naval annals.
On March 9th, 1762, in Toulouse, a Huguenot merchant was broken on the wheel for a crime that he had not committed. “It is because I am a man,” declared Voltaire, that he undertook the defence of the unhappy Calas family. His efforts, writes Edna Nixon, produced a drastic reform of the French judicial system.
Today a ‘beautiful but broken shell’, the Parthenon has housed three very different cults – those of Athena, Allah and the Blessed Virgin – since it was first constructed in the fifth century BC. It was a Christian soldier, in the siege of 1687, who did most to destroy the sanctuary.
Artist and Industrialist have rarely succeeded in establishing a fruitful alliance. But during the latter years of the eighteenth century, writes Neil McKendrick, such an alliance was formed—with results that we admire today. Wedgwood, a great potter, and Stubbs, a celebrated painter, agreed to pool their very different gifts.
