History Today

Harold Kurtz writes that the torments of a false conscience formed a secret experience that was with Talleyrand all his life.

What he had always wanted to be, Talleyrand wrote in later life, was “the man of France”—not the representative of a party, a political system or a sovereign master. Does this ambition, asks Harold Kurtz, explain his various changes of allegiance, including his “betrayal” of Napoleon, for which many French historians cannot forgive him?

On November 17th, 1874, when Henry Morton Stanley marched away from Bagamoyo on what was to be his greatest exploring achievement, he was retracing his own steps of 1871 along the well-worn caravan route used by Burton and Speke in 1857; by Speke and Grant in 1860, and, writes C.E. Hamshere, many Arab traders before them.

A gifted utilitarian, and sometime Member of Parliament, Douglas Hurd writes that John Bowring spent ten tumultuous years in China where he believed in supporting the cause of progress with British gunboats.

Educationalist. Co-operator. Capitalist. Utopian. W.H. Oliver describes how Robert Owen was doomed to foster ideas and programmes which caused him considerable distress.

Lucy Masterman’s husband was one of Lloyd George’s closest associates during the formation of the National Health Insurance and the controversies over the Parliament Act of 1909-1911. Mrs. Masterman draws on the records she kept at the time to offer a vivid portrait of Lloyd George’s intuitive political genius.

Patricia Wright describes the first Italian attempt to capture Ethiopia.

During the winter of 1935-6, writes Patricia Wright, Italian armies overran Ethiopia and annexed the Empire to the Italian Crown.

Prospects seemed encouraging for the Italian Empire in 1940, writes Patricia Wright, but an arduous defeat ensued.

J.W. Davidson describes how whalers, traders, and settlers represented the first waves of Western colonisation of the Pacific islands.