Military

'Sweet' Polly Oliver went to war to be with her lover, but there were many women for whom military life was an end in itself. Julie Wheelwright uncovers the career of one woman whose ambition was amply fulfilled.

Roy Macnab examines the ongoing debate on the two Frances of 1940 – epitomized on the one side by Petain and de Gaulle on the other – in the light of an heroic Cavalry stand against the German Blitzkrieg.

Ian Seymour looks at the involvement of Elizabeth I's astrologer in matters of state, and his diplomatic intrigues on the Continent on the eve of the Armada.

Anthony Goodman looks into the Scottish border culture.

Cultural cataclysm or merely a modification of an Anglo-Saxon status quo? Antonia Gransden looks at views, past and present, of the Norman conquest.

A separatist assembly of Federalist New England at the height of war-weariness provided precedence and philosophy for future defiance of the Union.

Were the Germans justified in executing a British merchant captain for ramming a U-boat in March 1915? Phyllis Hall considers a curious episode from the First World War.

Rex Cathcart examines how William's brief intervention in Ireland has provided a rallying-point in ideology and iconography for Protestants to the present day.

Edited by Jeremy Black

In May of 1588, Spain's great Armada set sail, bent on the invasion and conquest of Elizabethan England. Simon Adams re-examines the strategic considerations that underpinned the actions of both England and Spain before and after the Armada.