Volume 54 Issue 11 November 2004

Was Margaret Thatcher’s government close to defeat during the dark days of the miners’ strike of 1984-85?

Juliet Gardiner looks at what it meant to refuse to fight or lend support to the war effort in the Second World War, the different reasons people asserted this right, and how their actions were interpreted in wartime Britain.

Have politicians always been seen as liars? Mark Knights finds political spin at work in the early party politics of Queen Anne’s England.

Andrew Cook describes how a chance encounter with Houdini had a profound impact on the methods of Britain’s leading First World War spymaster.

John Lucas rejoices at the return of Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar to London after more than 120 years of ‘exile’ in Hertfordshire.

Historical novelist Linda Proud explains why she thinks fiction can be as truthful as ‘fact’.

David Harrison considers one of the greatest but most underrated achievements of the medieval world: the hundreds of bridges that defined the British communication system up to the 19th century.

The queen of Castile died on November 24th, 1504.

On November 1st, 1954, an insurrection broke out in Algeria.

Glenn Richardson looks at almost nine hundred years of enmity, jealousy and mutual fascination, a hundred years after the Entente Cordiale.