Political

In The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 Jonathan Healey holds Juntos and ‘jittery times’ responsible for England’s slide towards civil war.

Best of times or worst of times, how did the ‘greatest event that has happened in the history of man’ – as per Benjamin Disraeli – change the course of what followed?

Court-martialled in absentia on 2 August 1940, the Vichy regime confiscated de Gaulle’s property and condemned him to death. 

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz, collects the works of Cuba's ‘Apostle of Independence’.

Hinduism predates colonialism by thousands of years, but in Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Manu S. Pillai explains how European ideas shaped Hindutva.

The ancient world found him to have achieved greatness and thrust it upon his name, but was the destruction of Babylon Cyrus’ divinely ordained destiny?

In 1903 a group of politicians tried to sell tariffs as a panacea to all of Britain’s problems. Would the public buy it?

How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy alliance between oil, autocracy, and Wahhabism.

How to reform an ancient Greek tyrant? Plato’s final advice to Dionysius the Younger was not well received.