Volume 20 Issue 5 May 1970

It was Russia’s tragedy, writes Leonard Schapiro, that a greater man than Stalin supplied Stalin with the means to put his nightmare Utopia into practice.

During the sultry summer of 1911, writes Frank Hardie, a conflict between Commons and Lords presented King George V with one of the most difficult problems of his reign.

For Serbs the 1389 Battle of Kosovo was a physical defeat against the Ottoman Turks, but a moral victory that formed the backbone of Serbian national identity.

Four years after William I's conquest of England, writes J.J.N. McGurk, a Lincolnshire thegn named Hereward led a fierce resistance movement against Norman rule.

This cultured but energetic ruler left behind him ‘a governmental machine that was the wonder and envy of Europe’.

Stephen Usherwood describes how, in 1544, reports of a marvellous new flower, the tulip, first reached Western Europe, where it soon aroused a ‘fever of excited speculation’.