Interwar period

Leo Amery, the Last Imperialist

'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.

'Woodbine Willie': Religion and Politics after the Great War

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.

Barricades against Fascism: The Popular Front in Europe

Paul Preston and Helen Graham discuss the tension developing in the Europe of the 30s as the Left attempted to unite against the growth of Fascism and the bloody timetable of political collapse, uprisings and mutiny that transformed a half-successful coup d'etat into a protracted civil war.

Colonel Blimp's England

David Low, the cartoonist, met Horatio Blimp, a retired Colonel, in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross in the early 1930s. Many agree with C.S. Lewis that Colonel Blimp was 'the most characteristic expression of the English temper in the period between the two wars.'