Volume 63 Issue 4 April 2013

John Gillingham challenges an idea, recently presented in History Today, that the Anglo-Saxon King Egbert was responsible for the naming of England.

The Oxford Dodo has defined our idea of the creature. When alive, the bird was displayed in London as part of a kind of urban freak show. In death it featured in Alice in Wonderland. Charles Norton reveals what became of the last dodo.

In 1943 a train was stopped by resisters as it travelled from Flanders to Auschwitz. Althea Williams tells the story of a survivor.

Graham A. MacDonald reappraises the ideas and impact of the 20th-century political thinker, Michael Oakeshott.

Michelle Liebst looks at how the career of the great explorer of Africa reflects the wider failings of Victorian imperialism.

President Obama has more in common with Dwight D. Eisenhower than any other of his predecessors, says Michael Burleigh.

During his 1924 incarceration Adolf Hitler attempted to appropriate the ideas of some of Germany’s greatest thinkers and philosophers.

Derek Wilson looks at Henry Tudor’s long period of exile and asks what influence it had on his exercise of power following his seizure of the English throne in 1485.

Of the many immigrants from the United Kingdom who took up arms in the war, only a small number were English. 

This essay was the winner of the 2012 Julia Wood essay prize.