July 2018

Articles from the July 2018 issue of BBC History Magazine

ever before,” says Margaret MacMillan. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)

“We’ve come to think that peace is normal, but that’s not the reality”: Margaret MacMillan on humanity’s compulsion to go to war

Listening in: a doctor uses a stethoscope to examine a patient in 1948. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)

The birth pains of the NHS: how Britain’s National Health Service was created

Ragnar Lothbrok. (Illustration by Georgie Gozem for BBC History Magazine)

Ragnar Lothbrok: the legend of the immortal Viking and his sons

Mona Baptiste, a Trinidad-born blues singer

“London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation

Norman cavalry on the charge in the Bayeux Tapestry. (Image by Bettmann/Getty Images)

Second World War

The Library Why the Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry

English philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)

My history hero: Angela Burdett-Coutts

The city of Bern, Switzerland.

My favourite place: Bern, Switzerland

Sunlight dapples a clearing in Sherwood Forest, which was an essential resource for peasants centuries before it became a tourist attraction (Photo by Alamy)

Where history happened Ancient forests

Keith Thomas. (Photo by Fran Monks)

Books interview with Keith Thomas: “The world was divided into the ‘civil’ and the ‘barbarous’”

Anne of Denmark, wife of James I of England. Although she gave the appearance of a dutiful consort, Anne was ambitious for power and meddled in politics, says Tracy Borman. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)

Anne of Denmark: a killer queen?

Vera Brittain, who worked as a nurse during the First World War and went on to become one of the leading writers of the interwar years. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

First World War

Love, loss and distorted memories