What he had always wanted to be, Talleyrand wrote in later life, was “the man of France”—not the representative of a party, a political system or a sovereign master. Does this ambition, asks Harold Kurtz, explain his various changes of allegiance, including his “betrayal” of Napoleon, for which many French historians cannot forgive him?
Educationalist. Co-operator. Capitalist. Utopian. W.H. Oliver describes how Robert Owen was doomed to foster ideas and programmes which caused him considerable distress.
On November 11th, 1791, George Hammond, the first British Minister to the United States, presented his credentials to George Washington. Despite favourable auguries, writes Leslie Reade, his was to prove “a stormy and frustrating mission.”
The manner in which the Great War was fought after 1916, writes John Terraine, has decided the nature of the century we live in.
“He resigned.” Sir Winston Churchill has written of his father, “at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and he made no attempt to rally support.” By Robert Rhodes James.
Esther A.L. Moir meets the early English antiquaries— from William of Worcester to Sir William Dugdale—pioneers who laid the foundations of an important form of modern historical scholarship. Travelling up and down Great Britain, They kept a careful record of everything they heard and saw, investigating the monuments of the past and describing the landscapes of their own age.
