History Today

Henry Fairlie asserts that Aneurin Bevan strove to maintain, and even reassert, the predominance of politics over all its spurious rivals.

The news of Waterloo shocked American readers, writes Donald D. Horward, and most writers and editors refused to believe Wellington’s famous dispatch of June 19th, 1815.

During the American Revolution, writes Wallace Brown, several thousand Loyalists sought refuge in Britain — ‘sad victims’ of events.

Ian Young explains the many guises of Russia's Romanov ruler: in Napoleon’s caustic phrase, “the Talma of the North”; according to Chateaubriand, “a strong soul and a feeble character”; styled by Pushkin as, “the Sphinx who took his riddle with him to the grave”; Alexander began his life as a liberal visionary and ended it as an impassioned champion of the autocratic principle.

David G. Chandler offers a study in fact and fiction about a famous Napoleonic campaign.

David G. Chandler describes how the trouble Napoleon took over the interpretation of events at Marengo shows how deeply they had disturbed him.

Edna Bradlow writes that while Paul Kruger felt he had an obligation to protect his country's moral right on behalf of the Transvaal Republic, Chamberlain, speaking for his own countrymen, declared that the issue involved both “our supremacy in South Africa and our existence as a great power”.

During the early months of 1794, writes Vera Watson, in the throes of the fierce struggle against revolutionary France, the British Government received dramatic information which it treated as a top-level secret—two assassins were on their way to London, entrusted with the task of eliminating both Pitt and his royal master.

George Woodcock describes how the Imperial Conference of 1930, and accompanying events overseas, began the change of substantial empire into a shadowy Commonwealth.

The experience and approach of a historian: Roger Lockyer on writing historical biography.