Volume 55 Issue 12 December 2005

David Gimson describes a school trip with a difference: from Oxford to Japan to see how another country deals with its own contested and painful past, and to develop contacts for the future.

Peter Furtado introduces the man closer to Winston Churchill than any other.

Historical novelist Katie Grant delves into her family history for inspiration.

What did it mean to be an earl, and where did the title come from? Marc Morris looks at the relationship between the Norman and Plantagenet kings and their earls.

Mark Bryant contines his exploration of significant cartoons and caricature with a look at a German magazine that published some of the bravest satirical critiques of Hitler, bitterly attacking Nazism until 1933, and still published to the last years of the war.

Merchant Ivory’s latest film White Countess tells the story of a high-born Russian woman reduced to poverty and prostitution to support her family – refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution – in a Shanghai slum. Fraser Newham investigates the experience of the real White Russians of Shanghai and discovers this scenario to be close to the truth for many exiled Russian women.