History Today

Thomas Pakenham describes the ill-fated but remarkable efforts of a tiny French naval expedition to help conquer Ireland for the rebels during the 1798 Rising.

Written by a master, Mérimée declared, history was ‘as much superior to all novels and all plays as a diamond is to paste’. By A.W. Raitt.

J.D. Scott describes how a London banker, of Danish origin, played a large part in financing the unification of Italy.

The Republic of Guinea has been the scene over the centuries of several attempts at state-building. Basil Davidson records how the memory of past achievements strongly influences West Africa today.

John Raymond offers the picturesque records of an amiable spendthrift who lived through the greater part of one of the most eventful centuries of English history.

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.

E.E.Y. Hales describes Europe's premier revolutionary between the years 1835 and 1860, who was inspired by patriotism, belief in democracy, and lofty religious ideals.

Georgina Battiscombe introduces the Dean of Windsor; the wisest of Queen Victoria’s private counsellors and a relation of the Duke of Wellington.

‘If this Empire seems an evil thing to me, it is not because I hate the British...’ B.G. Gokhale on Gandhi’s attitudes to empire upon the centenary of his birth.

In 18th-century British politics, eloquence might change votes on the spot. Loren Reid describes how the voice of Whig politician Charles James Fox often did exactly that.