What he had always wanted to be, Talleyrand wrote in later life, was “the man of France”—not the representative of a party, a political system or a sovereign master. Does this ambition, asks Harold Kurtz, explain his various changes of allegiance, including his “betrayal” of Napoleon, for which many French historians cannot forgive him?
A gifted utilitarian, and sometime Member of Parliament, Douglas Hurd writes that John Bowring spent ten tumultuous years in China where he believed in supporting the cause of progress with British gunboats.
Educationalist. Co-operator. Capitalist. Utopian. W.H. Oliver describes how Robert Owen was doomed to foster ideas and programmes which caused him considerable distress.
Lucy Masterman’s husband was one of Lloyd George’s closest associates during the formation of the National Health Insurance and the controversies over the Parliament Act of 1909-1911. Mrs. Masterman draws on the records she kept at the time to offer a vivid portrait of Lloyd George’s intuitive political genius.
Charles Bawden discusses the shifting borders and evolving cultures of the Mongolian nation.
During over half a century, writes W.J. Fishman, Blanqui virtually personified the revolutionary movement in nineteenth-century France.
The famous French revolutionary was a graduate in medicine from St Andrews University, writes W.J. Fishman, and was once a teacher at a Non-conformist College in Warrington.
During the aftermath of the French Revolution, writes C.E. Hamshere, a prosperous state arose in Haiti under the leadership of a powerful and gifted ruler.
Hotman and Bodin were among those who laid down new lines of political thought in Europe, writes J.H.M. Salmon.
Bela Menczer describes the various intellectual and artistic personalities who conspired to produce the Exposition Universelle, in Paris, in 1867.
