Political

Graham Goodlad reviews the career of A.J. Balfour, an unsuccessful Prime Minister and party leader but an important and long-serving figure on the British political scene. 

The paradoxical career of one of the key figures of English Protestantism.

Ian Garrett looks at the experience of coalitions and minority governments in nineteenth and twentieth-century British politics.

Mark Rathbone puts the famous 1954 school segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, into historical context.

Once the classical world’s dominant port, by the early 19th century the city founded by Alexander the Great was seemingly in terminal decline. But the energy and vision of the Ottoman governor Muhammad Ali restored its fortunes and, ultimately, set Egypt on the path to independence, as Philip Mansel explains.

Richard Cavendish remembers the birth of the pianist who was also briefly prime minister of Poland, on 18 November 1860.

Richard Cavendish remembers the attempted coup against the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1960.

The gulf between the religious ideals of US conservatives and those of the European Enlightenment is as wide as the Atlantic. Tim Stanley looks at the origins and the enduring legacy of the American revivalist tradition.

The intriguing death of an Indian holy man in 1985 suggested that he was none other than Subhas Chandra Bose, the revolutionary and nationalist who, it is officially claimed, died in an air crash in 1945. The truth, however, is harder to find, as Hugh Purcell discovers.

Frank Dikötter looks at how historians’ understanding of China has changed in recent years with the gradual opening of party archives that reveal the full horror of the Maoist era.