Volume 59 Issue 9 September 2009

Frances Spalding on John Piper’s pursuit of an English vision during the Second World War.

The German army’s training, discipline and Blitzkrieg tactics – directed by the supremely confident Führer – swept away Polish resistance in 1939. It took the shell-shocked Allies another three years to catch up, writes Andrew Roberts.

On the anniversary of the London writer’s birth, Peter Martin celebrates the legacy of a man admired for his insight and humanity, qualities forged in the darker and less well analysed episodes of his life.

Recent research by medical scientists and historians suggests that George III had manic depression rather than porphyria. Scholars will need to take a fresh look at his reign, writes Timothy Peters.

Richard Overy examines recent analyses of how Europe became embroiled in major conflict just two decades after the trauma of the Great War and we look at events and broadcasts commemorating September 1939. 

The repatriation of British soldiers’ bodies from Afghanistan goes against a long tradition of burying the war dead in some foreign field and brings the conflict closer to home, writes Nick Hewitt.