History Today

Though UK governments rejected US requests to send troops to Vietnam, Britain did not stay out of the war, says Marc Tiley.

In his youth hailed by Carlyle as a “new Mystic,” later acclaimed by his contemporaries as the “saint of rationalism,” John Stuart Mill was an extraordinarily versatile writer. Maurice Cranston profiles a man of very wide interests, who became the personification of Victorian liberal democracy and “the agnostic’s equivalent of a godfather” to the infant Bertrand Russell.

A manager of men and a master of contemporary politics, writes Esmond Wright, Dundas was Pitt's energetic colleague “during the most critical years in British history except for 1940”—not a hero, but a vigorous man of affairs who “rendered some service to both his countries.”

M.J. Sydenham describes how, returning from the Colonies “with a most dreadful antipathy towards the government and nation”, this one-time highwayman conceived the scheme of striking a dramatic blow for America”.

Often expelled, the Jesuits have as often returned. The unpopularity they excited was largely due to the power they exercised. How they came to acquire so much influence, writes E.E.Y. Hales, is “certainly one of the enigmas of history”.

At the age of twenty-one, in 1826, Disraeli published his first novel, Vivian Grey. Robert Blake describes the long career that lay before him, in which romantic politics and political romances were brilliantly blended.

With Nelson dead at the Battle of Trafalgar, vice-admiral Lord Collingwood took command. It was the tragic conclusion to a friendship that began decades earlier.

Asa Briggs reflects on two Victorian radicalists who employed controversial new means to secure power, drawing both fervent disciples and bitter enemies, before their eventual defeat as part of a reaction against the ideas and methods of the 1840’s.

Throughout the years of Chinese self-questioning in the second half of the nineteenth century, Tz’u Hsi, the Empress Dowager, held the stage, untouched by the new thought. By Richard Harris.

Dorothy Carrington describes how two citizens of Corsica, both of whom, in the Corsican tradition, aspired to political advancement, conducted a lengthy vendetta that had a decisive effect on the history of Europe.