Leading historians share the texts that have inspired and informed their work

“ From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former pri

An illuminating peak behind the Iron Curtain

On the morning of 9 January 1905 (22 January on the New Style calendar Soviet Russia later adopted), a crowd of striking workers marched peacefully through Saint Petersburg towards the Winter Palace,

In January 1918, a few months after Lenin’s Bolsheviks had captured the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Rhoda Power left the house in Rostov-on-Don where she was employed as a governess and wandered throu

The Germans possessed two monstrous M-Gerät howitzer guns nicknamed ‘Big Bertha’ – but they were barely finished and had undergone no testing when the First World War broke out. Even so, on 2 August 1