History Fiend

Professor Julia Lovell discusses her recent book  Maoism: A Global History , which has just won the prestigious Cundill History Prize https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/maoism-who-was-mao-communist-leader-china-ideology-cundill-history-prize/

The Polish volunteer who infiltrated Auschwitz. Roger Moorhouse  | Published in  History Today   Volume 69 Issue 8 August 2019 Auschwitz If historical reputations were based on merit, Witold Pilecki would be a household name. Yet, the Polish Army captain who volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz in 1940, to report on the Germans’ nefarious activities in the camp, is little known outside Poland. This state of affairs should change with the publication of Jack Fairweather’s  The Volunteer . Fairweather, a journalist, has produced a lively and engaging biography of Pilecki, which draws heavily on contemporary accounts left by the subject himself. Pilecki’s story is certainly remarkable. In the autumn of 1940, he volunteered to be captured by the Germans in Warsaw, in the expectation that he would be sent to the new concentration camp at Auschwitz, from where he would report back to the Polish underground. At Auschwitz he witnessed the be...

It was not the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but the ‘Party line’, which brought an end to the era of ‘fellow travellers’, 80 years ago. Oscar Clarke  | Published 12 November 2019 A meeting of the British Communist Party, Earls Court, London, 5 August 1939 © Hulton Getty Images. It is ironic that the closest communism came to establishing a mass movement in Britain was between 1935 and 1939, when its adherents abandoned revolutionism and emphasised the defence of bourgeois democracy. The policy attracted not the proletariat, but the left-wing intelligentsia. The principle around which virtually all sections of the left could unite during that period was anti-fascism and the foreign policies of the National Government – appeasement in Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia and non-intervention in Spain – were regularly denounced. It was, in fact, widely feared that Britain was on the cusp of ‘going fascist’ itself. The Soviet Union joined the League of Nations around the sam...

David Prior of the Parliamentary Archives explains why we should be thinking about the Gunpowder Plot unseasonably early, this year. David Prior  | Published in  History Today   Volume 55 Issue 7 July 2005 The Gunpowder Plotters, Dutch, c.1605. About three years ago I, with colleagues at the Palace of Westminster, realized that we were approaching the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, when Guy Fawkes and a band of fellow conspirators tried to blow up the King as he attended the Houses of Parliament. To many English children, Bonfire Night, with its fireworks and Guy atop a blazing bonfire, used to be – and perhaps still is – one of the most exciting nights of the year, but the reason for it all is not always that obvious. Why did we take part in these strange rituals?  What did the Plot mean in 1605, what does it mean now? All this seemed an ideal subject for investigation in an exhibition, staged on the very site o...