Political

'Gaul in three parts' - Charles Giry-Deloison discusses how new scholarship is affecting our view of a fifteenth-century triangle of power and diplomacy in Northern Europe.

In 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain took the helm of a humiliated France. While Vichy endured, many took his silence as evidence of grand strategy – a view bolstered by the client press.

'You played your hand well. Well done.' High praise indeed from Stalin to an uneasy ally, as John Young describes in this account of the one and only meeting of 'Uncle Joe' and France's 'Man of Destiny'.

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.