Political

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, writes D. Pepys Whiteley, an easy-going Royal Duke was deeply embarrassed by the scandalous revelations of a discarded mistress, and by the publication of his private letters.

During his many years of administration, writes H.T. Dickinson, Walpole was highly unpopular with large sections of the community.

A man of obsessions, a passionate racialist with a romantic belief in the virtues of the ‘sturdy peasant farmer’, Quisling ruled war-time Norway as a devoted pupil of the Nazi government.

W.J. Reader describes a scandalous episode that arose out of the transfer of authority in India from the East India Company to the Crown.

“We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order” announced Lenin to the Congress of Soviets early on the morning of November 8th, 1917. He had prepared no blueprint from which to work, and forty years later, writes Ernest Bock, the structure of the Soviet state is very different from that which its founder envisaged.

Christopher Sykes describes how the last Tsar of Russia, as well as Adolf Hitler and other anti-Semites, were among those taken in by this spurious publication.

At Oxford, in 1833, writes K. Theodore Hoppen, a group of earnest reformers set out to infuse new spiritual life into the Established Church.

“It is time that the abuse of his enemies should be appreciated in its true light, and not accepted as impartial history merely because they happened to be distinguished men.” By Theodore Zeldin.

Many German professional soldiers, writes F.L. Carsten, were staunch opponents of the Nazi regime.

In 1862 a Japanese official mission visited England, nine years after the re-opening of their country to the world. Carmen Blacker describes how their strange attire and ‘inscrutable reticence’ surprised the mid-Victorian public.