Interwar period

In the interwar period, France and Germany worked towards an integrated Europe.  

Turkey has a long history of coups, but the failed İzmir plot to assassinate Atatürk in 1926 had a lasting impact. One foreign journalist recorded the reprisals that followed with admiration – which soon turned to fear.

Victor Silvester brought ballroom dancing to the masses and his enormous influence persists to this day in the TV show Strictly Come Dancing. Much less well known is his extraordinary career as a boy soldier in the Great War. Richard Hughes sets the record straight.   

French history since the revolution has been marked by promises of progress that end in bitter failure. The election of Léon Blum’s Popular Front in 1936 was one such example.

The archetypal image of the Weimar Republic is one of political instability, economic crisis and debauched hedonism. The cliché is being challenged.

As a minister in the German cabinets of 1921-2, writes David Felix, Rathenau faced formidable problems of post-war reconstruction.

The problems of the interwar mining industry, which led to a General Strike in 1926, writes W.H. Chaloner, epitomized the struggle between capital and labour in twentieth-century Britain.

During the winter of 1935-6, writes Patricia Wright, Italian armies overran Ethiopia and annexed the Empire to the Italian Crown.

The mining dispute of 1921, writes Patrick Renshaw, was one of the most serious industrial conflicts that Britain has faced.

David Mitchell introduces the Italian Romantic poet who played a brief part upon the European political stage.