History Today

W. Bruce Lincoln describes how Nicholas exercised a more personal control in state affairs than any other ruler since Peter the Great.

Catherine’s cordial relations with the greatest thinkers of her day were no mistake, writes A. Lentin, but an integral part of her statecraft.

It was Russia’s tragedy, writes Leonard Schapiro, that a greater man than Stalin supplied Stalin with the means to put his nightmare Utopia into practice.

In the age of the Encyclopaedists, writes Wilfrid Blunt, Linnaeus applied his great classifying talents to the world of plants.

A.L. Rowse describes the life and career of the foremost Persian and Sanskrit scholar of his day.

Joanna Richardson describes how Queen Victoria wrote as she certainly must have talked - with common sense, some simplicity, much shrewdness, and occasional indiscretions.

During the eighteenth century, writes Bill Hooper, ‘barbaric anarchy’ reigned at Eton.

Once the hall of Richard II’s palace, Westminster Hall became a centre of the British judicial system and, writes Leonard W. Cowie, a popular meeting-place for Londoners.

‘A true moderate’, Madame de Staël sought ‘to formulate the theory and effect the practice of real political freedom’. By M.J. Sydenham and Frances S. Montgomery.

Under the terms of the Armistice, writes Geoffrey Bennett, the ships of the German High Sea Fleet were interned and not surrendered. Hence they were manned by their own crews, who eight months later were able to carry out “an act of treachery.”