Political

When money for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists began to dry up in the late 1930s, he turned to novel schemes for fund-raising. James and Patience Barnes recount the intriguing story.

Juan Cole looks at the pacifist, prophetic and millenarian 'world religion' whose leader emerged from the social and political unrest of 19th-century Iran and whose followers have since been persecuted by shah and ayatollah alike.

Michael Diamond discusses what popular songs and singers had to say about Britain's politicians in the 1880s and 1890s.

Pious nobleman or calculating humbug - what is the true characterisation of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester? Simon Adams sifts the motives for the patronage given to some of Elizabeth's sternest religious critics by her favourite courtier.

The author of a 4000-year-old hymn to one God has been portrayed as a mad idealist who turned the civilisation of the pharaohs upside down. John Ray discusses the man and his myth.

Bruce Nelson traces how the magic of FDR and his practical social programmes welded American labour to the Democratic Party, and discusses the tensions that eventually weakened that union.

Irrational chauvinists or fearful protectionists? Gordon Daniels looks at the new research and arguments reshaping our view of Japan's rulers before and after Pearl Harbour.

Solidarity forever? Not by 1951, Robert Zieger argues, when the visit of one of American labour's great heroes to a celebratory rally at a Ford Motors complex near Detroit revealed just how deep the split between old- and new-style unionism had become.

'Am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can't'. Alonzo Hamby traces the web of influences from his boyhood in a Mid-West town that shaped the character of America's 33rd president.