Political

The first, uneasy, relationships between Europeans and Aborigines soon began to turn into outright hostilities, despite the well-meaning efforts of several Europeans.

Kevin Sharpe reassesses the role that ideology, rhetoric and intellectual discussion played in the upheavals of seventeenth-century England.

Scapegoat or quisling extraordinaire? Douglas Johnson probes the motives and actions of Vichy's chief minister to find insularity and gamesmanship his fatal flaws.

'Revisionism' has now become a historian's catch-phrase. Long-cherished interpretations of upheavals in British and European history have been re-examined. In this light, Glyn Redworth examines revisionist interpretations of the English Reformation.

Fresh air, sexual liberation, manual work and socialism was the heady brew offered by the leading exponent of anti-Establishment attitudes at the end of the Victorian era.

'Stirring up divine discontent' by education to effect a transformation of the social order became the credo of one of Victorian Christian Socialism's most colourful characters, far outpacing the more temperate aims of its founders.

'... a kind of Ken Livingstone of his day', Britain's great imperialist made his early reputation as a civic radical, promoting public control of local amenities such as water and gas.

‘Trade follows the flag’ is a truism of imperial expansion but in the 1680s it was the other way round, as the East India Company attempted to challenge the might of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

The hubris of Louis XI's Constable produced his nemesis against a background of incipient French nationalism and a growing royal sense of 'majesty'.