Volume 58 Issue 4 April 2008

Spaces in the Past

Martin Evans talks to Helen Dunmore, whose historical novels range from the worst horrors of twentieth-century warfare to the luxurious world of late Republican Rome.

Reds Under the Bed

International alarm over the terrorist threat is not new. Anthony Read relates how the appearance of Bolshevism created a state of near hysteria throughout the Western world.

Polite Accomplishments

Anthony Fletcher delves into the diaries of teenage girls in the Georgian and Victorian eras to explore the little-changing constraints, punishments and occasional delights of being brought up a girl in upper-class Britain before the Great War.

A 15th-century French manuscript illustration showing Alexander in a cage that is lifted into the air by six griffins.

That Magnificent Man in his Flying Machine

Richard Stoneman investigates the strange but widely held belief in the Middle Ages, that Alexander the Great had conquered more than the land, taking to the air and travelled to the ocean depths.

Which Way Cuba?

As Fidel Castro finally hands over the reins of power after forty-nine years, Michael Simmons finds his country poised between past and future.

The Case for Conscription

Many who supported the campaign for compulsory military service in Edwardian Britain saw it as a necessary measure against the threat of invasion and the shadow of German militarism. Others identified it as a valuable counter to ‘softness, indiscipline and unmanliness’ in young men of the period. Detractors, meanwhile, feared it could be used to overthrow the state. Tom Stearn describes the campaign, how it was received and what it achieved in the run up to the First World War.