History Today

For five years, writes Owen S. Connolly, Jnr., in the face of Allied intervention, Napoleon's talented and amiable older brother attempted to govern the Spanish people.

On the eve of the Treaty of Amiens, writes D.G. Chandler, the French Army was eliminated from Egypt, and news of the victory heartened the British public.

Having lost hope of invading the British Isles, in 1797 the French Directory made a bold attempt to cut off their enemy's East-Indian trade routes. The agent they chose was Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant young general, D.G. Chandler writes, already fascinated by the Eastern scene.

Reputed to be a place of enormous wealth and during the seventeenth century known as “the golden isle”, Madagascar, before it achieved its independence, was long the subject of contention between French and British empire-builders.

After the collapse of France in 1940, writes Geoffrey Warner, “French Parliamentary democracy perished at the hands of a man who had mastered its every art”.

T.H. Corfe analyses a double assassination in Dublin that long left its scar on Anglo-Irish relations.

Julian Symons describes how, in the year of South African crisis, 1899, Buller, once regarded as the ablest of British commanders, was stricken by a strange failure of nerve.

One of the Prince’s last and most notable services to his adopted country, writes Sir John Wheeler Bennett, was the redrafting of a provocative British despatch at a moment of high tension in Anglo-American relations.

The German Progressive Party was founded in 1861, writes F.L. Carsten, but “the Liberals desired the unification of Germany so ardently that they were willing to forego their political ambitions when Bismarck gained unification at the point of the sword.”

In modern French politics, writes John Terraine, the Army and its champions — “still treading the long road back from Sedan” — have sometimes played a dangerous part.