Volume 8 Issue 4 April 1958

During a short-lived phase of expansionism the United States wrested Cuba and the Philippines from their Spanish rulers. 

No other leader of the French Revolution held the centre of the revolutionary stage so long as Robespierre. George Rudé portrays him as its personification and guiding spirit — a man of lofty aspirations, though according to the popular legend a fanatical man of blood.

Of the British officers who fell at Waterloo, writes Antony Brett-James, none was more distinguished than General Sir Thomas Picton.

For forty years, ruler of an alien country, Mohammed Ali attempted a revolution from which Egypt might have emerged into the twentieth century “as a small-scale Japan.”  

Defeated enemies, as history shows, may become devoted allies. Once Rome had seemed the tyrant of Italy. After the successful outcome of the Social War, writes Harold Mattingly, her Italian neighbours took their places at her side, ready to assist her in the gigantic task of government.

Save at the Arthurian Court, writes Dorothy Margaret Stuart, such splendid scenes had never before been witnessed as accompanied the marriage of Edward IV’s sister to the Duke of Burgundy.

S.G.F. Brandon describes how the Roman conquest of Jerusalem marked a crisis in the early development of Christianity, and paved the way for a general acceptance of the Pauline message.

Only ten years ago, Trieste seemed likely to become the Sarajevo of a Third World War. Here J. Garston, a military eye-witness, describes how, thanks to a combination of tact and firmness, an apparently impossible problem was for the time being solved.