Volume 40 Issue 6 June 1990

Ann Hills explores heritage Down Under.

Lesser breeds without the law? In a revealing new study of the Hellenistic world in the three centuries after Alexander carved out an empire in the East, Peter Green argues that condescension and cultural arrogance rather than a mission to civilise marked Greek reaction to the population they ruled over.

In 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain took the helm of a humiliated France. While Vichy endured, many took his silence as evidence of grand strategy – a view bolstered by the client press.

Scott Goodfellow on the row over archaeology by tender.

'After the love of God, I am intoxicated with the love of Prophet Mohammad. If you call it infidelity, by God I am the greatest Infidel'. Francis Robinson looks at the nineteenth-century Punjabi whose proclamation of a role as 'promised Messiah' still brings hostility from orthodox Muslims to the movement he spawned.

Sarah Jane Evans visits the National Railway Museum, York, with its emphasis on social history, science and technology and interactive exhibition.

A failure of national will in a decadent country, outgunned, outmanned and divided by class conflict? Douglas Johnson opens our summer series of Second World War reappraisals by looking at the myths and legacies of the fall of France to Hitler's blitzkrieg fifty years ago this month.

'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.

From joyous spring rite to politicised holiday – Chris Wrigley traces the annexation of May Day through the efforts of the increasingly active labour movement in the early 1890s.