Victorian

Ian Bradley shows that the characters and plots of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas reveal much that is of interest to the historian about certain individuals and institutions of the Victorian era.

It is through reading the letters that the soldiers sent home, argues Frank Emery, that “the Victorian rank and file cease to be a mute and anonymous body of men marching past in scarlet or khaki columns.”

The life of Rhodes - an empire-builder, arch risk-taker, megalomaniac mine-owner and namesake of Zimbabwe's pre-independence antecedant, Rhodesia.

At first allowed by the British politicians “only just as much space as he could stand upon” Queen Victoria’s Consort, nevertheless, succeeded in setting the pattern for modern constitutional monarchy, as G.H.L. LeMay here shows.

Graham Seal explores the life and legend of Ned Kelly.

The census of religious worship taken in England and Wales in 1851 gives a unique insight into the religious habits of our Victorian predecessors which, as Bruce Coleman explains, is very much at variance with the popular image of them.

'Monumentally bad diplomacy, worse strategy, chaotic military organisation and inept generalship' - Thomas Tulenko describes how great powers have failed in their attacks on Afghanistan. Penned as Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul in December 1979, the BBC's David Loyn offered his own analysis thirty years later.

With the increase in Irish immigration into Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, concern arose about the resurgence of Catholicism. Yet not all women in convents were helplessly detained there, as explains Walter L. Arnstein.

Picture postcards may seem a commonplace means of communication, but, when they first came into use, they caused a revolution in people’s writing habits. T.J. Brady writes how they led to the creation of a considerable industry and became the subject of a collecting craze almost unparallelled.

G.M. Young portrays the golden political calm and sense of cultural comfort at play in mid-Victorian England.