Interwar period

Frank McDonough reviews the debate over Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy.

David Elliott looks at how Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler used culture to their own ends and how the ramifications of this has continued to the present.

A 17-day political dogfight at the 1924 Democratic National Convention revealed the faultlines in American society, from prohibition to Protestantism to the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan.

Hitler's march into the demilitarised Rhineland heralded Churchill's 'gathering storm' – but could the Fuhrer's bluff have been called and the Second World War prevented? Sir Nicholas Hederson, who as Britain's ambassador in Washington during the Falklands crisis saw diplomatic poker eventually turn to war, offers a reassessment of the events of 1936.

Did the system spawn a monster - or a monster the system? Norman Pereira re-evaluates the road to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union after the Revolution, and Stalin's part in it. 

Milton Goldin compares American philanthropy past and present.

'A life of action and constant fidelity to a set of ideas': Max Beloff takes a fresh look at the career of Leo Amery with the publication of the latter's second volume of diaries – a man by no means the stereotype of an inter-war Conservative politician.

Buying and selling with our 'kith and kin' was the hallmark of an intensive inter-war campaign for the idea of Empire.

Gerald Kennedy shows how a fear of revolution and the growing strength of organised labour created tensions in Britain after the end of the First World War. Men such as 'Woodbine Willie' attempted to defuse the situation by preaching the gospel of 'Christian Socialism' at mass meetings across the country.