Interwar period

When the English and Nazi German football teams met for the first time on British soil in 1935, the game was not the headline.

The Loch Ness Monster’s first appearance on film captured both the hype and the scepticism surrounding cinema’s newest star.

Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network and David Reynolds’ Mirrors of Greatness seek to bring Churchill’s contemporaries and adversaries out of his shadow.

What are stars made of? When a young astronomer upset standard explanations for the formation of the solar system, the establishment told her she was wrong – then stole her findings.

Just two countries supported the Republic during the Spanish Civil War: the Soviet Union and Mexico. While Soviet help came with strings attached, Mexico’s reflected the country’s contentious relationship with its old colonial master.

To support ex-servicemen injured during the First World War, charities like St Dunstan’s found creative ways of fundraising. 

On the centenary of Britain’s first Labour government, three recent histories cast a sympathetic eye over Ramsay MacDonald’s nine months in Number 10.

A short telephone call between Joseph Stalin and Boris Pasternak sealed the fate of a fellow writer. What exactly transpired during that fateful discussion remains subject to debate.

Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang explores the discrimination beneath Hollywood’s glamour.

Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust holds the ambivalent accountable.