History Today

Of the British officers who fell at Waterloo, writes Antony Brett-James, none was more distinguished than General Sir Thomas Picton.

The legend that Babeuf had created and the doctrines of Babouvism became a powerful force in nineteenth-century Europe. W.J. Fishman writes how, among those whom it inspired, were the authors of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Thin, pale, solitary, a day-dreamer, opinionated, rebellious, with sudden bursts of energy that quickly evaporated, D.C. Watt writes that Hitler as a boy is a strange forerunner of the would-be world-conqueror.

“Treat the Pope as though he had an army of 200,000 men"—Napoleon. By E.E.Y. Hales.

For forty years, ruler of an alien country, Mohammed Ali attempted a revolution from which Egypt might have emerged into the twentieth century “as a small-scale Japan.”  

Lenin’s return to Russia by German agency in April 1917, writes David Woodward, was one of the turning points in 20th-century history.

Christopher Lloyd profiles a highly successful businessman of modest and abstemious habits, John Julius Angerstein, who formed a magnificent collection, the nucleus of London’s National Gallery, at his house in Pall Mall.

During the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Ascendancy in Ireland, writes William D. Griffin, was dominated by Lord Clare, a figure both reviled and admired.

A history cartoon by Rob Murray.

A 1972 essay on women petitioners of the mid-17th century anticipated greater engagement with the political ambitions and private lives of ordinary men and women, says Alice Hunt.