Political

Previewing his forthcoming biography, Robert Knecht argues that recent whitewash has failed to cover guilty blood.

Malcolm Crook takes a fresh look at the eighteenth-century alliance between philosophers and kings.

Kenneth Baker argues that cartoonists have let recent Prime Ministers off lightly compared with their eighteenth-century predecessors.

Presentation of the past as a seed-bed of modernity gives it bogus relevance to modern concerns. Two hundred and fifty years after the battle of Culloden Jeremy Black looks at a classic instance – the military challenge of the Jacobites.

W A Speck looks at new thinking about the emergence of whigs and tories.

In the second instalment of a two part article, Roger Eatwell chooses between rival definitions of a slippery word

Frank McDonough looks at recent thinking on the origins of the war of 1899-1902

Raphael Mokades - the winner of the 1996 Julia Wood Award - argues that military failure in the Boer War transformed political attitudes in Edwardian Britain.

Edward Coleman weighs up Modern Italy's Northern League against its medieval Lombard inspiration.

Elizabeth van Houts reconstructs memories of occupation (with echoes of the 1940s) from post-Norman conquest chronicles.