Volume 74 Issue 4 April 2024

So called because it passed without a shot being fired, the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 brought Portugal’s authoritarian Estado Novo to an end. Could the state have survived?

Columbine marked the beginning of a new era of high-profile mass shootings in the US. Was the attack the inevitable outcome of lax controls and a culture of gun glorification?

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff refutes the claim by Virginia Woolf, that the women of Tudor England left only empty bookshelves.

When it was first named in 17th-century Switzerland, nostalgia was a very real – and very dangerous – disease.

Wills in early modern England tell us much more than simply who left what to whom, and should not be discarded lightly.

How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War by Kimmo Rentola argues that political guile as much as military might stopped the Soviets in their tracks.

On 5 April 1889 John Hore died aged only seven years old. His adventures in East Africa saw him immortalised by Victorian evangelicals as ‘the boy missionary’.

What is the most boring history book you have read, and why? Excruciating tedium can have intellectual value, says George Garnett.