History Today

Robin Bruce Lockhart traces the development of Russia's fleets, from the Napoleonic era to the Soviet period.

George Rudé analyses the events of what started as an anti-Catholic protest, but ended with violence and looting.

On the morning of October 21st, 1805, writes Christopher Lloyd, Nelson’s crushing defeat of the combined naval forces of France and Spain won for Britain an unchallenged mastery of the seas that was to last for over a hundred years.

J.M. Thompson profiles Napoleon's revolutionary younger brother, who often clashed with the French leader.

Greenwich has for centuries been associated with the Royal Navy, and from 1705 until 1869, writes Richard Ollard, the Royal Naval Hospital was the home of pensioned veterans.

Charles Dimont asserts that few small countries have had such a variety of alien rulers as Malta, and yet maintained such a highly distinctive identity.

Robert Rhodes James profiles the man rivalled only by Gladstone as the most able politician and Parliamentarian of his time.

Hitler had taken enthusiastically to his years in the army during the first World War. D.C. Watt describes how, afterwards, the future führer worked with equal zeal — and served his political apprenticeship — as a propagandist for a Bavarian counter-revolutionary army group.

The conflagration of the Reichstag provided Hitler with a heaven-sent opportunity. But the theory that the Nazis had planned it themselves now appears to be entirely baseless.

The atmosphere of plot and intrigue that surrounded the last few years of the Third Republic, writes Geoffrey Warner, has given French right wing extremists a taste for armed conspiracy.