France

'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.

Paris' most famous landmark is one of the world's great attractions, but the plans to build the Eiffel Tower raised a storm of protest at the time.

'For sale, our tyrant King! Five shillings and you can string him up'. Mark Greengrass probes the motives behind and reaction to the murder of France's last Valois monarch.

An English cricket team set out on a goodwill visit to Paris in the turbulent summer of 1789. But the proposed tour never took place. Overtaken by events, it turned back at Dover. John Goulstone and Michael Swanton compile the following account from broadsheets and from correspondence, between certain of the personalities involved.

To export the Revolution's benefits across Europe was the early hope of the French - but the unenthusiastic response from the liberated peoples rapidly soured the vision. Tim Blanning chronicles that descent from optimism to realpolitik.

Olwen Hufton chronicles the varied but influential voices of feminine awareness that intervened, often decisively and despite male misgivings, in the course of the Revolution.

Despite the later conflicts between Church and Revolution, Nigel Aston argues that the majority of France's churchmen in 1789 were keen for reform and eager for change.

In the years after the First World War, aviation became the most exciting form of transport, the spirit of a new age; but for French women, as Sian Reynolds explains, it was also a paradigm of their struggle for equality.

There is nothing new in the practice of terrorism through hostage taking. Gregor Dallas traces its roots to the events in Paris during the Spring of 1871 when the city was riven by civil strife.

Roy Macnab examines the ongoing debate on the two Frances of 1940 – epitomized on the one side by Petain and de Gaulle on the other – in the light of an heroic Cavalry stand against the German Blitzkrieg.