Irene Collins provides a fresh assessment of the life and work of one of this country’s greatest novelists, whose own wit and charm, combined with a deep insight into human nature, is reflected in her novels. Jane Austen was not the first woman novelist in England to achieve popularity and...

While cartoons have been widely used by historians of ‘High Politics’ or diplomacy, they have been used less often by social historians. Alan Fowler and Terry Wyke examine a source for the social history of the Lancashire cotton industry. Cartoons have long held a fascination for historians, though when using...

Andrew Whitfield examines the recovery of Hong Kong from the Japanese, 52 years before its return to China. As the clock ticks ever closer to midnight on 30 June 1997, the sun will set on Britain’s last major colonial outpost. Thousands of miles from the motherland, the colony originally acted...

Nicholas Hammond provides an account of a little known Strategic Operations Executive intervention in the Middle East. In the summer of 1940, when Italy joined Germany, it was clear that attacks on the British position in the Middle East might be made from Italian bases in Africa and in Rhodes...

A.D. Harvey discusses a once-familiar feature of the inner city landscape. A generation ago one often saw advertisements, or the names of commercial enterprises, painted directly on to the brickwork of old buildings. With the destruction, or renovation, of the older sections of most British towns, these advertisements are now...

A century ago Britain celebrated Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee – her reign having provided 60 years of stability at the height of Britain’s imperial power. Dorothy Thompson profiles the woman at the heart of the Empire. More than any other British monarch, with the possible exception of her one-time model,...

Ian Beckett reviews recent revisionist interpretations of the Western Front. English teachers have much to answer for in terms of the enduring popular image of the Great War. Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves are still pressed regularly into action as if they could possibly stand representatives of the...

HM Inspector John Hamer reviews the evidence. In a lecture marking the 150th anniversary of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools, Peter Gordon recalled a nineteenth century HMI, the Reverend W.H. Brookfield. His circle of friends included Tennyson, the Hallams and Thomas Carlyle.

Following the recent ‘Euro 96’ championship, Jim Phillips looks at two earlier international football tours which had major political and ideological connotations. In November 1945 Moscow Dynamo became the first Soviet football team to visit Britain, playing in Cardiff, Glasgow and twice in London. With English, Welsh and Scottish crowds...

As the leading athletes of all nations prepare to come together this summer in Atlanta, the global communications media of the late twentieth century are constantly reminding us that 1996 marks the first centenary of the modern Olympic Games. The worldwide impact now made by these sporting festivals is all...