Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War?
It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood?
“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 prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event. Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come. The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding. Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”. Strangling Bolshevism Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia – and even to the USSR – was by no means one of unremitting hostility. And that was reflected in the Fulton speech, too. He was no admirer of tsarist autocracy, and even less so of Soviet communism. But during the First World War he eulogised Britain’s Russian allies, and was distressed when they dropped out of the conflict. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2148990418webready-1ebb782-e1773837016975.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A Soviet propaganda poster shows a person in a white shirt lifting a red flag with gold tassels against a red background." title="A poster declares the Soviet Union’s commitment to “stable peace”. By the time Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech, such peace appeared fragile" /> Churchill became the strongest advocate of intervention in the civil war that followed the October Revolution of 1917, and always regretted the failure “to strangle Bolshevism at its birth”. Following Hitler’s rise to power, he began to see the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Nazi Germany, and even as a possible ally. In a March 1939 interview, he asserted that the USSR had “hitherto shown no trace of the aggressive intentions” behind the recent actions of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. Even after the Soviets and Germans signed a non-aggression pact that August, he appeared to foresee that the USSR’s national interests would eventually force Stalin into an anti-German posture. His prediction came true with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The functional but troubled Anglo-Soviet alliance that followed provides the crucial backdrop to the breakdown in relations that the Iron Curtain speech signalled. Churchill continued to view diplomacy through a traditional ‘Great Power’ lens. That is to say, history was made via hard bargains between the paramount countries, recognising each other’s spheres of influence and legitimate interests, and often involving the ruthless sacrifice of weaker peoples and nations. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-544235714webready-7c819e2-e1773923825162.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A dynamic propaganda illustration depicts revolutionaries on a massive red machine marked “1917,” waving red flags and carrying rifles as they charge ahead, while caricatured figures of the old regime are shown below, fleeing or being crushed." title="Withdrawing money: A Soviet propaganda poster shows bankers fleeing the Russian Revolution. Churchill viewed the events of 1917 as an enormous tragedy. (Image by GettyImages)" /> Churchill’s wartime meetings and correspondence with Stalin were based on this principle – and also on the belief that personal relations were crucial, and that his own individual charm could make a difference. He said in 1942 that he “liked Mr Stalin, liked his jokes and his humour, but could have gotten on with him a lot better if he could have talked with him directly instead of through an interpreter”. Combining tough talk with schmoozing and flattery, he believed that mutual recognition of British and Soviet spheres of interest represented the path to a safer future. The Iron Curtain speech of 1946 reflected the continuation of this approach, rather than a radical shift in outlook. Read more | Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three's war of words Falling for Stalin’s charms Churchill, however, oscillated between optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of Soviet behaviour. After the February 1945 Yalta conference – at which the British, Soviet and American leaders discussed the postwar reorganisation of Europe – the prime minister told colleagues: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Yet as the Red Army’s advance progressed, he became increasingly concerned about the prospect of Soviet dominance of Europe. On 12 May, just a few days after VE Day, Churchill wrote to President Truman of the need to reach a concordat with the USSR before the British and American armies ‘melted’ with the onset of peace. “An iron curtain is drawn down between their front,” he added. This was his first rehearsal of a phrase he would later make famous. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-690507912webready-b966227-e1773837530368.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A military parade of uniformed soldiers marches in front of the heavily damaged Reichstag building, its dome partially destroyed." title="On the march Red Army troops in Berlin, 1945. Western leaders were, by now, growing ever more alarmed at the prospect of a Soviet-dominated Europe" /> Six days later, Churchill lectured the Soviet ambassador, accusing his Kremlin masters of “dropping an iron screen across Europe from Lubeck to Trieste, behind which we had no knowledge of what was happening”. Churchill’s diatribe did not have the desired effect. The ambassador told Moscow that “we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with an adventurer, for whom war is his natural element”. Indeed, Churchill was already pondering ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a military plan – quickly dropped – for a potential military conflict with the Soviets. But at the Potsdam conference of July 1945 (at which the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders convened once more), he was, in the words of foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “under Stalin’s spell again”. Eden reported that Churchill "kept repeating: 'I like that man.'" <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1354478830webready-bf749bf.jpg" width="4630" height="3087" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows several men in formal suits and military uniforms gathered closely, speaking with one another indoors." title="Admiring gaze Stalin (second left), Truman (centre) and Churchill (right) at the Potsdam conference of summer 1945. It was here that the British PM repeatedly remarked of his Soviet counterpart: “I like that man”" /> Churchill’s participation in the negotiations was about to be brought to a sudden and unexpected end – for, before the Potsdam conference was concluded, news came through that he had been voted out of power in that summer’s general election. Churchill’s shock electoral defeat was a bitter political and personal blow, but it didn’t have a material impact on Anglo-Soviet relations: the new Labour government carried on foreign policy on familiar lines. When parliament reassembled, Churchill made his first public reference to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain”. His words were reported in the press but did not make headlines, and attracted little comment. It should be noted that Churchill was now speaking in a new context, following the successful test of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though he could not say so openly, he hoped that the American monopoly of the new weapon would be the lever that would keep Soviet ambitions in check. He was thoroughly conscious of Britain’s weakening global strength, and believed that a strong relationship with the US was key to escaping its precarious position. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-513666223webready-da7f49c-e1773838887773.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a towering mushroom cloud billowing upward over a city landscape" title="Bargaining power An atomic bomb explodes over Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. This display of might persuaded Churchill that the west could negotiate with Stalin from a position of strength. (Image by GettyImages)" /> For this reason, the message he received from Truman that autumn was a godsend. The president passed on an invitation from the head of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to deliver the annual John Findley Green Foundation Lecture on problems of international concern. “This is a wonderful school in my home state,” scribbled Truman on the letter. “Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.” Churchill, still harbouring designs of returning to Downing Street, now had an opportunity to relaunch himself on the world stage, as well as to take a holiday in the sun. During his lengthy absence from home at the start of 1946, Churchill sojourned in Florida and Cuba before travelling to Washington, DC. Truman accompanied him to Fulton by train. As the train approached Missouri, a crisis was unfolding in Persia (now Iran) on the back of a speech by Stalin that seemed to anticipate conflict with the capitalist powers. The Soviets had failed to withdraw all of their troops from the north of Persia by the deadline that had previously been agreed. But though the president was increasingly incensed by their stonewalling stance, he was not yet ready to lay his fears and frustrations in front of his war-weary populace. With no official responsibilities, however, Churchill could speak frankly in a way that those in government could not. Read more | How the Cold War made the modern world The bombshell moment On 5 March, Churchill delivered his remarks before 2,700 people, all of them white. As one black American newspaper noted, the college was “located in a state where Jim Crow is a legal instrument of government and Negro boys and girls are barred from its portals by law”. The mainstream media made little of this shocking fact, but the message contained within the speech itself was regarded as a bombshell. Churchill’s oration was 46 minutes and 5,000 words long. The ‘iron curtain’ phrase came at the two-thirds mark. It was part of a broader warning about the Soviet Union’s “expansive and proselytising tendencies”, which Churchill backed up with claims about Moscow’s search for “totalitarian control” in the countries of central and eastern Europe. Yet despite the muscular rhetoric, scholars now tend to emphasise that the Iron Curtain speech was not a Cold War clarion call intended to stoke tensions. This is another way in which the speech has been misunderstood. Churchill undoubtedly wanted to reset relations through plain speaking, but he also wanted to show the Soviets that he understood their perspective. Hence he stressed his “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin”. He stated that he understood “the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression”. It was necessary, he said, to reach “a good understanding on all points with Russia” under the auspices of the recently formed United Nations. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-514080312webready-522ed2b.jpg" width="3115" height="2076" alt="An older man in a light smock and hat sits in a wicker chair, painting a coastal landscape at an easel." title="Brush with destiny Churchill at his easel in Miami Beach, February 1946. President Truman’s invitation to speak at Fulton gave the former PM an opportunity to soak up some sun and" /> Over the following days and weeks, few observers paid much heed to the more emollient sentiments in Churchill’s speech. The nuances of the former PM’s words were easily lost in the media tumult. In fact, the forcefulness of his overall message risked exacerbating the problem he was trying to solve. “Churchill’s speech is sure some blockbuster, as one American paper describes it,” noted one ordinary observer, a female librarian back in Britain. “I read it first in full, and later heard extracts; and I must say that his delivery was so calm and flowing that the parts which had horrified me in print seemed perfectly innocuous as he spoke them.” Churchill offered not only a diagnosis of the perils of deteriorating east-west relations but also a remedy – and in the US it was the latter that proved especially divisive. He urged that a robust response to the Soviets should be built upon “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States”. This seemingly innocuous phrase was widely (and correctly) perceived as a concealed call for a military alliance between the UK and the US. Read more | Winston Churchill created the special relationship. Could Donald Trump kill it? This lit a fire, because former isolationists still distrusted the British empire, and progressive idealists believed that a bilateral pact would be a threat to the integrity of the UN. Leo Amery, Churchill’s former secretary of state for India and Burma, thought it was an error to link the admonitions about the Soviets and the alliance concept together in one speech. “The Americans are intensely suspicious of any attempt to inveigle them into being mere instruments of British policy in the Old World,” observe Amery. Meanwhile, Adam Clayton Powell, the first African American to represent New York in Congress, claimed that Churchill wanted “an English-speaking dictatorship” and “a form of super-nationalism based on race” that would plunge the world once again into war. Truman had known of the speech’s contents in advance but, when the political kitchen heated up, denied having done so. Britain’s Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, took refuge in the claim that his government was “not called upon to express any opinion of a speech delivered in another country by a private individual”. However, in private he was less dismissive: “It will certainly have done good if it encourages the Americans to think and to recognise the need for the United States and the British Commonwealth to work together,” he said. The destiny of the world It is not clear if Churchill really expected the speech to cause the Soviets to change their attitude – but if so, he failed. “Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation,” Stalin told the Soviet state-mouthpiece, Pravda. “Mr Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.” With fear spreading, Moscow housewives started panic-buying. The Soviet authorities then tried to calm the public, spreading the message that “Stalin’s interview did not mean that war was in sight”. The Fulton speech may have elicited a frosty reception in Moscow but, within a year, despite the initial misgivings, its once-controversial message had found widespread acceptance in the west. As tensions between America and the Soviet Union ratcheted up further, the 1947 Truman Doctrine committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. The doctrine is now seen by some historians as marking the true start of the Cold War. To this day, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic pay lip service to the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’. And Churchill was not quite done with the Soviet Union. Prime minister again from 1951–55, he ploughed his remaining strength into a vain quest for a rapprochement with the post-Stalin Kremlin. This was not because he had changed his mind; rather, his quest for détente was of a piece with his longstanding approach to great power relations and his belief in the importance of negotiating from a position of strength. He was convinced that the greatest chance of peace lay in convincing the Soviet government that they were confronted by superior force that would be used ruthlessly against them unless they mended their ways. “Then the communists will make a bargain,” he judged. East-west relations would have continued declining with or without the Iron Curtain speech. Yet although Churchill did not start the Cold War at Fulton, he selected its defining image – and with carefully crafted vocabulary he created an indelible mental picture that influenced all subsequent debate. Metal coinage Was Churchill really the first to use the phrase 'Iron Curtain'? “Iron curtain: a state of rigid censorship and secrecy (coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the line of demarcation between western Europe and the Soviet zone of influence)”. This was the definition included in the American College Dictionary. But the editors remained uncertain – had Churchill genuinely originated the term? In 1951, a member of that publication’s team wrote to him to find out. There were good reasons for wondering. The metaphor is based not on conventional domestic drapes but on the fire safety curtains used in theatres. In a 1904 novel, Churchill’s friend HG Wells (pictured) described how, when a character is deprived of his freedom, “an iron curtain… dropped between him and the outer world”. The historian Patrick Wright credits the writer Vernon Lee (a pseudonym for Violet Paget) as being the first to deploy the term in an international relations context. She wrote of “war’s monstrous iron curtain” dividing the two sides after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. After the October 1917 revolution, the phrase was used in a new sense. In her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia, Ethel Snowden described her arrival in Petrograd as part of a Labour delegation: “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!” It is more than possible that Churchill was acquainted with these examples. But, if so, the influence was unconscious. In response to the query about the origins of his words, he replied: “No. I didn’t hear of the phrase before – though everyone has heard of the ‘iron curtain’ which descends in a theatre.” The dictionary definition stood. The fact that Churchill saw ‘iron curtain’ as a standard expression may explain why he did not do more to attract attention to it. The official title of his speech was ‘The Sinews of Peace’. This, in turn, offers a clue as to why the famous phrase didn’t dominate newspaper headlines. The Daily Express, for example, ran with “CHURCHILL URGES EMPIRE ‘ALLIANCE’ WITH U.S”. The first BBC reporting, on the 11pm radio news, omitted the ‘iron curtain’ passage altogether. Churchill was a genius with words. But even he did not know which of his own would be best remembered. Was ChurcWas Churchill really the first to use the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’?hill really the first to use the ph Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is co-host of the podcast Churchill: The Finest Half Hour This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
"We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century
Words have the power to alter the course of history. They can harden the resolve of an entire nation or people, encapsulate the ideals of a movement, and evoke joy – or provoke anger – long after they have been said. Here, Dr Seán Lang explores 14 of the most influential quotes of the past 100 years
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/RooseveltGettyImages-464783507-622899f-e1773405930967.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Franklin D. Roosevelt sits at a desk in an official setting, with papers, a microphone, glasses, and an ashtray arranged in front of him, heavy curtains framing the background." title="President Franklin D Roosevelt prepares for his inaugural speech, 1933. The former New York governor had won the presidency based on his promised ‘New Deal’, which lasted until the Second World War (Image by Getty Images)" /> 1. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” Franklin D Roosevelt, 1933 The United States lay devastated by the Great Depression, an economic collapse without precedent that destroyed the country’s global image as a land of opportunity and reduced millions of Americans to poverty and destitution. The governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had run for and won the presidency on the promise of a massive recovery programme, dubbed the ‘New Deal’, but he knew he could do nothing unless the American people first regained their self-belief. In his inaugural address on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt reassured them that they had nothing to fear, except fear itself – “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” The New Deal lasted throughout the 1930s until World War II set the country back towards full employment. Through the programme of reforms, regulations and projects, Roosevelt understood the power of words. He explained policies simply and clearly to radio listeners in his ‘fireside chats’, reassuring Americans that they had what it would take to improve their own lives and that the government would help. Roosevelt was elected an unprecedented four times, but it was that first inaugural message that set the tone for his time in office and helped give back the US its self-belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ChurchillGettyImages-2667802-081f3a8-e1773403673660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man in a suit and hat stands outside a brick building, holding a cane and raising his hand in a V‑for‑Victory gesture" title="Winston Churchill gives his famous ‘V for Victory’ hand signal outside 10 Downing Street. The prime minister made some of his most memorable speeches during the first few months of his premiership, when Britain came under threat of German invasion (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. “We shall never surrender” Winston Churchill, 1940 By June 1940, it seemed that Hitler had won his war. He had conquered Poland; launched a devastating assault in Denmark and Norway; and attacked in the west, invading the Netherlands and Belgium, and storming through northern France to cut off the British army and much of the French. It was only a matter of time before France was forced to surrender and German troops entered triumphantly into Paris. To any impartial observer, it seemed obvious that Britain had no choice but to seek a peace settlement with Hitler. But Winston Churchill, Britain’s pugnacious and controversial new prime minister, decided to ignore those pressing him to do just that. In an electrifying speech to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940, later broadcast on the BBC, he declared that Britain would fight on and never surrender – that “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”. Churchill knew that Britain’s navy and air force would make a German invasion hazardous, though not impossible, and that the only chance of defeating Nazism was to keep going until the United States could join the war. His words defined the stubborn defiance and ‘Dunkirk spirit’, which saved not just Britain but the world from a Nazi victory. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Mao-ZedongGettyImages-515210286-5fc8355-e1773403801718.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Mao Zedong, wearing a military-style uniform and cap, stands on a balcony and claps while looking over a wide avenue filled with a dense crowd and banners." title="Mao Zedong, seen here in an undated photograph, first used the phrase ‘paper tiger’ during a 1946 interview. The term is now popularly used to describe threats that are less powerful than they might first appear (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. “The atom bomb is a paper tiger” Mao Zedong, 1946 The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 redefined the world. Leaders had always been able to plunge their peoples into war, but now they could wipe out whole cities, even countries, with a single order. While the United States was the only one with nuclear capability at first, the Soviet Union was not far behind thanks to communist spies in the west passing nuclear secrets to Moscow. Read more | Reign of the red terror: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution In an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1946, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, described the atom bomb as a “paper tiger”, something that looks more dangerous than it is. Mao meant that all governments depended on the support of the people, and they would never consent to using atomic weapons. The phrase was taken another way: no government would dare use such weapons for fear of provoking a response from the other side. This was the idea behind the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ during the Cold War, as the power and number of nuclear weapons intensified. Even then, the world came perilously close to disaster on more than one occasion. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Mandy-RiceGettyImages-1365867502-dd9056f-e1773403905292.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people gathers outside a stone building while several British police officers in traditional helmets stand among them, appearing to manage or escort individuals through the crowd." title="Mandy Rice-Davies (centre left) leaves the Central Criminal Court after testifying at the 1963 trial of her friend Stephen Ward. Questions about the model’s alleged affair with a Tory peer prompted a now-legendary response (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” Mandy Rice-Davies, 1963 This ordinary retort marked an unlikely watershed in British social history. Marilyn (better known as Mandy) Rice-Davies was a model and dancer working in London’s Soho, where she met Christine Keeler and her friend and protector, Stephen Ward. A successful osteopath, Ward was well-known in high society, hosting parties and introducing girls like Keeler and Rice-Davies to his well-connected friends, including the Secretary of State for War John Profumo and the Conservative peer Lord Astor. A public scandal ensued when the truth of Ward’s parties was revealed, especially with reports that Keeler had slept both with Profumo and a Russian naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov, which made the affair a diplomatic furore. Rice-Davies was a witness at Ward’s trial. It was widely held at the time that people in high society were trustworthy and honourable, incapable of the lewd behaviour associated with ‘lower’ classes. When it was put to Rice-Davies that Lord Astor denied her claim of an affair, the assumption was that his word was worth more than hers. Her cheeky response – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” – suggested that the aristocracy were no more honourable than anyone else. The remark caused a sensation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Cassius-ClayGettyImages-545316246-1db1a81-e1773404032921.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A boxer wearing a shiny robe with “CASSIUS CLAY” on the back stands in the ring with both gloved hands raised in triumph as spectators watch from the packed arena." title="Cassius Clay celebrates his win over Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden, March 1963. The boxer, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali the following year, frequently described himself as ‘the Greatest’ (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. “I am the greatest” Cassius Clay, 1963 Muhammad Ali, who changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964, was always much more than a boxer: he was a role model for young black people around the world and a major international celebrity, mixing his sporting triumphs with irrepressible charm and wit. Boxing had long been a way for poor Americans to better themselves. Clay, who came from the segregated South, won the light heavyweight gold medal at the age of 18 at the 1960 Rome Olympics before turning professional and starting an immense career that saw him become world heavyweight champ three times. As well as a pugilist, though, Clay was a charismatic self-promoting poet always showing his gifts for trash talking. In 1963, shortly before announcing his conversion to Islam and his new name, he issued a record of rhythmically spoken poetry entitled I Am the Greatest. Ali continued to describe himself proudly as ‘the Greatest’, but he put his reputation and career on the line, and even risked jail, by refusing to serve in the US Army in 1967 as the war in Vietnam raged. His case went to the Supreme Court and Ali became a symbol of growing American opposition to the war, and a figurehead of the civil rights movement. He was now a champion of the dispossessed as well as ‘the Greatest’ in the boxing ring. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Martin-Luther-KingGettyImages-517357504-1305bdb-e1773404333188.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Martin Luther King Jr. stands at a podium filled with microphones, delivering a speech to a large crowd. People in the background wear uniforms, hats, and formal clothing." title="Martin Luther King Jr delivers his iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech during the March on Washington, 1963. The rally is considered a watershed moment in American history (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. “I have a dream” Dr Martin Luther King Jr, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic speech was delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, an enormous statue of the US president who had ended slavery in the United States. By the 1960s, however, true emancipation was still far off as African Americans faced entrenched legal discrimination and police violence. King, who had made his name leading protests against racial segregation, was speaking to a huge civil rights rally calling for jobs and fair treatment for America’s black population, but his speech went much further than that. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? King’s style of oratory owed much to his background as a Baptist preacher and his imagery, of a dream in which black and white people lived in harmony and friendship – and where his children “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” – was in line with the visionary sermons that many of his listeners had heard in church. The power of his words went far beyond the 17 minutes that his speech took and the 250,000 people gathered on that day, 28 August 1963. They became not only a defining moment of the civil rights movement, but of US history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Hannah-ArendtGettyImages-135314633-43360a4-e1773404990659.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person in a dark buttoned shirt with a brooch and patterned trousers reclines against a plain wall, one hand resting beside them holding a cigarette, their gaze angled upward." title="Hannah Arendt poses for a portrait, 1949. The philosopher’s reflections on the atrocities of the Second World War – and the motives behind them – sparked fierce debate (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. “The banality of evil” Hannah Arendt, 1963 In May 1960, Israel took the world by surprise when its secret service agents kidnapped and abducted a German living in Argentina who gave his name as Ricardo Klement. In fact, he was Adolf Eichmann, one of the key figures in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. He was put on a plane to Israel and in 1961 he faced a criminal trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German-American writer and academic, asked the New Yorker if she could cover the trial for them. They agreed. In Arendt’s eyes, the bespectacled Eichmann, wearing a cheap suit instead of his Nazi uniform, seemed like any other middle-ranking office clerk; he could just as easily have been working for an insurance company or a bank. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to highlight the way evil can flourish not just by good people standing by, but by ordinary people in ordinary jobs carrying out instructions without ever questioning their morality. Her analysis ran into a storm of controversy. Jews were unhappy at her criticisms of what she saw as a show trial by the State of Israel; more recently, Holocaust scholars have pointed out that the viciously antisemitic Eichmann was very far from being a small cog in the machine: he was a proactive and energetic enforcer of the Final Solution, most notably directing the mass murder of the Jewish population of Hungary. However, Arendt’s idea that evil does not need supervillains, but merely enough ordinary people doing their ordinary jobs remains a powerful insight. She gave us the words to describe it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/BeatlesGettyImages-84999643-9c296eb-e1773405091446.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Four men pose at a busy press event as photographers gather around them. Behind them are large globe‑shaped balloons and clusters of bright red, yellow, and blue balloons. One man holds a sign that reads “LOVE.”" title="The Beatles take part in a press call to promote the Our World television broadcast, in which they performed ‘All You Need is Love’ for the first time. The song’s simple refrain was designed to have international appeal (Image by Getty Images)" /> 8. “All you need is love” The Beatles, 1967 The Beatles were at the height of their fame and influence by the 1967 ‘summer of love’. Pop music had developed into a young people’s lifestyle and outlook that their parents, of the wartime generation, found utterly bewildering. The Beatles did not just produce hit records: they put forward a new philosophy, which overturned the older generation’s assumptions about behaviour, dress and morality. When their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared in May, it quickly took on cult status. A month later, the group unveiled a new song, ‘All You Need is Love’, as part of the first global live television link-up called Our World, which was watched by an audience of approximately 400 million. The song had been purposely written with simple repeated lyrics to appeal to the international viewers, and so summarised the new attractive, easy-to-grasp philosophy in clear terms. As the song itself says, “It’s easy”. Older heads might point out that life needs a lot more than love, but in 1967 few young people were listening. Pop music has been one of the defining cultural influences that mark the postwar world: it has overcome generational, social, political and cultural barriers with its infectious rhythms and simple messages. While ‘All You Need is Love’ may have always been an ideal, it has endured. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Neil-ArmstrongGettyImages-1512723-8b06da7-e1773405173996.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A photograph of a ridged footprint in a grey clay-like floor" title="A close-up photograph of Neil Armstrong’s famous boot print, 1969. The astronaut’s first words after stepping onto the Moon became instantly iconic – despite a slight stumble in delivery (Image by Getty Images)" /> 9. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” Neil Armstrong, 1969 That, at any rate, is what Neil Armstrong meant to say when he stepped down from the lunar module onto the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969. Either he slipped on his words, or they were obscured by a bleep in the transmission, because the version heard back on Earth did not have that crucial “a”. It did not seem to matter. Armstrong was right: it was a giant leap, though at the time no one quite knew in what direction. Space exploration had excited people around the world since the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and putting a human being on the Moon had seemed the ultimate prize. Where was all this endeavour to go after that? Science fiction suggested a world of space voyages, but the reality was to be much closer to home. Space technology moved into the world of satellites, first for telecommunications and later for everything from television to meteorology and traffic management. Inevitably, the military potential of space was quickly recognised. The Moon missions opened space up as a further area of operation for the nations of the Earth, so Armstrong was right, even if he got his words wrong. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ThatcherGettyImages-1215188595-b93ab08-e1773405339874.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman with wavy, permed hair sits at a microphone, wearing a black and white patterned suit and white shirt with V neck collar. She has large pearl earrings and sits against a blue background" title="Margaret Thatcher addresses a press conference at Conservative Party HQ in 1987 – the year her interview with Woman’s Own magazine sparked controversy (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. “There is no such thing as society” Margaret Thatcher, 1987 The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, ushered in a revolution. Her immediate aim was to resolve the economic problems into which the country had sunk in the 1970s, which she did by promoting a new philosophy based on free enterprise and the rolling-back of state control. In an interview for Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher outlined her belief that, ultimately, it is not for the government to resolve people’s problems; individuals and families must look after themselves and their neighbours. In that sense, she said, “There is no such thing as society”. The phrase provoked a storm of controversy. Supporters applauded her emphasis on individuals, while opponents denounced what they saw as her uncaring attitude towards the Welfare State, which many regarded as the most significant change in 20th-century British society. The phrase encapsulated two completely different political philosophies: a belief in the power of the state as a force for good or as an enervating drain on the people’s energies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/ReaganGettyImages-514906046-9ed3ad8-e1773405425624.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Ronald Reagan delivers a speech at a podium surrounded by microphones, seated officials behind him. A section of the Berlin Wall stands in the background with a German warning sign." title="Ronald Reagan makes his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. The Berlin Wall was toppled two years later (Image by Getty Images)" /> 11. “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Ronald Reagan, 1987 The postwar Soviet Union seemed a menacing, repressive world, in the grip of its secret police and ruled by a set of grim-faced old men in coats, so the emergence in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party came as a pleasant surprise. Not only did he seem more human and approachable, but he was clearly open to a closer and warmer relationship with the west. Even Mrs Thatcher commented that she liked Mr Gorbachev: he was a man she could do business with. Gorbachev embarked on a wholesale reordering of Soviet life and institutions, beginning with perestroika (restructuring) and notably glasnost (openness), encouraging people to speak openly and honestly about their lives, their past and even their government. Western countries sat up and took notice. Was it changing into a western-style democracy? Were the days of tanks rolling into eastern European capitals to crush liberation movements truly over? Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'? US president Ronald Reagan decided to test him. In 1987, the president gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Soviet Union’s hostile rejection of the west. He welcomed the changes Gorbachev was making, but called on him to take the most far-reaching step of all: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” No one really believed he would, but it was thought that it might force Gorbachev onto the defensive. What no one predicted was that only two years later a mass movement of people, taking their cue from Gorbachev’s glasnost policy and calling openly for freedom of speech and movement, would force communist governments from power. When in May 1989 a journalist asked Gorbachev if the wall might come down, he replied, smilingly, “Why not?” By the end of the year, it had. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/Hillary-ClintonGettyImages-526599660-40d8ade-e1773405542290.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Hilary Clinton, with shoulder length coiffed blonde hair, wearing a dark top and a pink, white and gold neck scarf. She stands in front of a microphone, and is turned towards the left, looking at someone out of frame" title="First Lady Hillary Clinton addresses a news conference in 1995. Her declaration that “women’s rights are human rights” helped bring the cause of gender equality into the global spotlight (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights” Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1995 The feminist movement had used a shorter version of this phrase since the 1980s, but it entered the mainstream when Hillary Clinton, wife of American president Bill Clinton, spoke at a United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The transformation of the position of women in society was one of the most striking changes to take place in the 20th century. In Britain and the US, the century had begun with the celebrated campaign for women to have the right to vote, and by the end feminism had developed as a movement and philosophy that sought to transform human society along the lines of equality. Clinton was an apt figure to give voice to the aim. She was a lawyer who, in 1974, had been part of the Watergate investigation team that brought down President Richard Nixon. But her husband’s own presidency meant that she had to perform what was essentially a ceremonial role. She could support Bill in his duties, but could she hold office herself? As long as women’s rights continued to be regarded as a category on their own, it seemed that women would never be accepted as equals – hence her impassioned iteration that women’s rights are not just rights for women: they have always been basic human rights. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stoneB8C7su-215cbe1-e1773405675845.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A young boy with dark hair and round glasses stands in a snowy street, dressed in a black robe with a yellow and maroon badge on his chest and a yellow and maroon striped scarf around his neck. On one arm he is holding a white owl" title="Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) with his trusty owl, Hedwig, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001). JK Rowling’s wizarding franchise rapidly became a global phenomenon – despite opposition from some Christian groups (Image by Warner Bros.)" /> 13. “You’re a wizard, Harry” Robbie Coltrane (as Rubeus Hagrid), 2001 When JK Rowling’s debut novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, it was regarded as simply another imaginative children’s book from a first-time author. As word went round school playgrounds, however, the popularity of the series grew. Soon, crowds were gathering at bookshops to buy each new title as soon it appeared, along with Harry Potter audiobooks, videogames, tie-in toys and merchandise. Then in 2001, the first of a highly successful series of Harry Potter feature films made its way on to the big screen. What had begun as a series of children’s books had become a global phenomenon, with the words “You’re a wizard, Harry” (spoken by Hagrid actor Robbie Coltrane in the first film adaptation) becoming part of cinematic history. Hogwarts, Harry’s school of witchcraft and wizardry, is clearly a nostalgic throwback to the days of Britain’s famous private schools, with their uniforms, dormitories and special trains. But much of her message is more universal: a passionate defence of honesty and integrity against the dark forces of evil in the world, including those to be found in people who sit in authority. The formidable but kindly headmaster Albus Dumbledore is a sort of Old Testament prophet; the clash between Harry, whose parents gave their lives for him, and Voldemort (aka Tom Riddle), a boy who has given in to his dark side, is a modern stand-off between Jesus and Lucifer, the fallen angel. Did Harry Potter come to embody a substitute religion in the secular post-Christian western world? Certainly, fundamentalist Christians denounced the books and forbade their children from reading them. We can be sure that historians will be looking closely at the Harry Potter phenomenon for many years to come. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/For-EveryoneG5BD6F-9c59143-e1773405794351.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A packed stadium at night glows with blue and purple lighting. In the upper stands, illuminated seats spell out “THIS IS FOR EVERYONE,” while a central stage features a house‑shaped structure with projected visuals." title="Tim Berners-Lee’s cameo appearance at the 2012 Olympics ended with the words “This is for everyone” being beamed around the stadium. The words were intended to convey the democratic ideals behind the World Wide Web (Image by Alamy)" /> 14. “This is for everyone” Tim Berners-Lee, 2012 One of the most significant moments during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics was also one of the quietest. After a stunning display that charted rural Britain’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse came a dance sequence depicting a 21st-century house party, complete with a full-size replica of a suburban home at its centre. Then, the house lifted up to reveal a middle-aged man sitting at his computer sending out a tweet: "This is for everyone.” The man was Tim Berners-Lee, and in 1989 he laid the foundations for what would become the World Wide Web. The web transformed the modern world just as totally as the Victorian industrialists had. Computers had always been huge, complex objects, the preserve of scientists and governments; until fairly recently, the most sophisticated item that people carried around with them was a pocket calculator. What Berners-Lee did was to create a way that would connect computers with each other, anywhere in the world, whether they were in people’s bedrooms or in the headquarters of international agencies. Suddenly, ordinary people had access to pretty much anything they might want to see. This was a democratic revolution as well as a technological one. As any government knows, access to information is power, and it was now in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. Tech companies grew from small gatherings of like-minded geeks into formidable multinational powers, able to face down governments. Of course, such power also brings responsibility, but Berners-Lee’s message at the Olympics was that the web should always be for everyone. A simple message – but a truly revolutionary one.
Tracy Borman steps into the vibrant – and dangerous – world of the Tudor court, and considers what it took to maintain law and order over the turbulent 16th century
The Tudor world was a turbulent one, with momentous decisions reliant on the whims of those in power. But how was authority felt by the average person? And what were the consequences of losing favour with those in charge? In this first episode of our series Tudor England: the big questions, Tracy Borman introduces Emily Briffett to the movers and shakers of the Tudor royal court, exploring what it took to run the country - and escape the monarch’s wrath. Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below: View Green Video on the source website
From Stranger Things to communist cars: why we can't resist nostalgia
In our politically unstable modern world, the allure of retreating into memories – sometimes mirages – of bygone eras seems to have grown. Six historians explore how this tendency impacts our historical understanding
“The nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated” The first thing to remind ourselves is that our view of the past is definitely shaped. The way that we understand history is translated, constructed, created for us in multiple ways – the majority of which have very little to do with the actuality of what happened. We imagine and dream history across culture, making versions of it that comfort us and accord with our world views. Film, television, games, adverts, heritage spaces, novels – they all enable us to inhabit other times, to form our sense of memory, to consume the past. Nostalgia is simply one of the ways that we access these feelings of pastness. It is incredibly powerful because of its appeal to emotion beyond rationality. It is a way of connecting with the historical that ignores order and authority – and historians underestimate it at their peril. Nostalgia has become a keynote for contemporary collective memory. Global populist politics are shot through with a dangerous nostalgia for a claimed glory that has been seemingly squandered. This is not new, but it is newly dominant. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2WX7XXY-CMYK-12a5f8b-e1772530438298.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A poster for the TV show Stranger Things, showing four children on bikes on a long road with a yellow line down the middle. They are all looking towards a red, cloudy sky" title="The hit series Stranger Things is “a confection of an imagined 1980s”, says Jerome De Groot, enjoyed by an audience of whom many have “no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés” (Image by Alamy)" /> In the television series Mad Men (2007), Don Draper cynically uses the past to sell product, observing: “Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent.” Memories of the past can be manipulated. The biggest English-language show worldwide in 2025 was Stranger Things, a confection of an imagined 1980s – Spielberg, Nike, Kate Bush and the Cold War melded to present a version of the decade. Yet the nostalgia that Stranger Things evokes is complicated. Much of the show’s target audience has no memory of the eighties other than a cultural hangover of tropes and clichés. The eighties it recollects is itself rooted in a view of 1950s US small-town life. The nostalgia at work here is culturally performative, sold as an expression of algorithmic power rather than actual choice. No one remembers in a neutral way; everyone’s version of the past is a translation enabled by culture. Nostalgia is delicate, but this fragility is a kind of pure experience – even if it is prone to commodification. Jerome De Groot is professor of literature and culture at Manchester University, and author of Double Helix History (Routledge, 2022) “Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters” Nostalgia seems to be everywhere – so much so that some people argue there’s something specific about the 21st century that prompts nostalgia. But it has been around, in one form or another, for centuries – and it has profoundly shaped our relationship with the past. The term ‘nostalgia’ was coined by a Swiss physician in the late 17th century. At the time, it was deemed a disease – a kind of pathological homesickness. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that it morphed into its more familiar form: a longing for a bygone time rather than a distant place. Since then, nostalgia has been our constant companion, becoming rife in popular culture, journalism and political commentary in the 20th century. The 1970s has even been dubbed the “second-hand seventies” for that reason. Psychologists have also studied nostalgia’s prevalence, arguing that it’s experienced by pretty much everyone, all of the time. Though some people might be more or less prone to the feeling, nostalgia is a core human experience with distinct evolutionary advantages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-3259343webready-3771e14-e1772529840639.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a large group of children playing on a roundabout in a playground. Some adults stand to the right, watching over them. Behind them all are some large brick walls and a few high rise buildings" title="Children play on a roundabout in a London housing estate, 1973. Thanks to nostalgia in popular culture and media, that decade has been dubbed the “second-hand seventies”, notes Agnes Arnold-Forster (Image by Getty Images)" /> Broadly, nostalgia can be divided into two types: personal and historical. The first is the nostalgia you feel about your own life; the second is nostalgia for some period in the past that you haven’t yourself experienced or lived through. Read more | Swings and roundabouts: a history of Britain's playgrounds It is the latter that poses the most problems. In political life, it is often lambasted as the emotional driver behind rightwing populist movements. Academic historians also take issue with this brand because it paints a sentimental and often inaccurate portrait of the past, and advocate detached, dispassionate and objective investigation. Yet not only is it impossible to quell nostalgia’s influence, that also shouldn’t be the goal. Nostalgia is one of history’s greatest promoters. And history is not just an academic enterprise. It is a vibrant ecosystem of period dramas, battle re-enactments, museums, documentaries and genealogists. Nostalgia might not be the only thing that draws people to the past – but where would this ecosystem be without its seductive emotional force? Agnes Arnold-Forster is chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion (Picador, 2024) “Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms” Nostalgia, as the old joke goes, isn’t what it used to be. Twenty years ago, the term was popularly associated with the embattled citizens of eastern Europe, who retreated from the shock of market capitalism into a cosy world of Trabants, Lenin statues and the evocative smell of communist-era pickle jars. Appropriately enough, it was the Russian-American scholar Svetlana Boym who came up with the era’s most perceptive analysis of nostalgia. For her, the pull of a “restorative nostalgia” – a longing for a home or homeland that has never existed – was always at play in the nationalist fantasies of the right as much as it also shaped people’s memories of communism. Today, nostalgia speaks in a different idiom, in ALL CAPS and acronyms – MAGA, MEGA, ‘Take Back Control’ – but Boym’s warnings still ring loud and clear. Here, a look at recent history can be helpful. Nostalgia for a fantasy of imagined racial homogeneity is hardly a new force in British politics. Keir Starmer’s unconscious echoing of Enoch Powell’s noxious rhetoric (in 2025 the PM said Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers”, a phrase he later expressed regret for using) highlights how the spirit of Powell is animating contemporary political discourse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-2233375765webready-490da1a-e1772529952548.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing twelve tall lampposts in a line, each with a single England flag on them, blowing in the wind" title="The English flag flies from lampposts in Sheerness, 2025. The way Britons express nostalgia has changed a great deal over the past 20 years, argues Benjamin Jones (Image by Getty Images)" /> In my field, modern British history, a number of analysts have diagnosed ‘imperial nostalgia’ as an underlying cause of the Brexit-era lurch to the far right. I wonder if this is quite right. Though we might accept that some nationalists dream of resurrecting the British empire, most people’s feelings regarding our imperial past are probably messier and less coherent. Cultural theorist Paul Gilroy argued two decades ago that, rather than acknowledging the complexities of empire, the British instead retreated into “postcolonial melancholia”. Imperial pride was expressed just as colonial violence was denied. We need a cure for such morbid symptoms. Migrants – the enslaved, the indentured, the impoverished, more rarely the privileged – made empire and re-made Britain in turn. Clear vision is required to understand this past; rose-tinted lenses will only obscure our view. Benjamin Jones is author of The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-Century England (Manchester UP, 2012) “German Democratic Republic nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one” When Boris Johnson visited socialist East Germany months before reunification in 1990, he was “amazed at how far behind West Germany” it was: a land “of strange little cars with two-stroke engines and fake coffee”. Most East Germans agreed, keen to swap those “strange little” Trabant cars for VWs, and to leave behind the dictatorship and its make-do economy. Today, things are changing. Cars made in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) are seeing a revival. Restored Trabants fetch up to 7,000 Euros – close to the sum paid when new. Though half of owners are over 60, thousands are under 30, born long after the last Trabi left the factory. This fits into a wider trend of GDR nostalgia, or Ostalgie. In 2019 – 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell – a survey found that 10 per cent of East Germans wanted the GDR back. When the newspaper Nordkurier asked the same question recently, it was nearly a quarter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1555920290webready-0db3990-e1772530085287.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of several small, colourful cars parked together, in front of a large building with a central circular tower and pointed rooftops" title="Trabant cars in central Leipzig, East Germany in February 1990, shortly before that state’s reunification with West Germany. A resurgence in the brand’s popularity reflects nostalgia for the certainties of communist rule (Image by Getty Images)" /> GDR nostalgics are a minority, but a growing one. Ask them why, and most cite not socialist convictions but a feeling that life was simpler during the Cold War. The present, with its wars, economic uncertainty and rapid technological change, can feel frightening. So the small world of the GDR appears reassuringly predictable, irrespective of the Stasi’s omnipresence. The Trabi embodies this paradox: it’s a tiny, underpowered car but one that anyone can repair and on which families relied for decades. West Germans aren’t free from nostalgia. With the rise of the far right, unstable coalitions and economic pessimism, many reminisce about the postwar era and its political stability and economic miracle. West Germany was no dictatorship but it was staunchly conservative, initially limiting opportunities for women and social mobility. There is no moral equivalence, but Westalgie also views history through a soft filter. Read more | Life in East Germany: the cultural evolution behind the Iron Curtain In our uncertain times, the pull of Cold War nostalgia is seductive. Historians must stay the course of academic rigour and integrity, providing a much-needed lifeline of solid analysis until calmer days return. Katja Hoyer is a historian, journalist and visiting research fellow at King’s College, London. Her forthcoming book is Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe (Allen Lane, May 2026) “The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film” As Agnes Arnold-Forster concludes in her recent historical work on this “dangerous emotion”, there are “many nostalgias”, not just one, so assessing whether it shapes our view of the past depends on context and specific detail. Of course, we should be concerned by nostalgia’s role as a social and political emotion – the contentious yearning for an idealised ‘lost’ place or past. Its potential for manipulation demands particular scrutiny in relation to histories, collective memory and public understandings of the present as well as the past. These are no idle fears in our present times. When it comes to period films, historical media genres and their audiences, I would question how much nostalgic pleasures and practices really tell us about the public’s relationship with British history. The ‘nostalgia’ label is often applied indiscriminately to almost any period film or media text, regardless of its genre or intentions, and also to audiences. This issue was a core motivation for my 2011 empirical study Heritage Film Audiences. Even the (few) respondents who expressed acute nostalgia were self-reflective on the subject. “We would not really swap our comfortable modern lifestyle for those days,” wrote one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-1319979896webready-5db6466-e1772530181978.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a person's hands holding an old photo of a woman in a high necked dress holding a small child in a white dress. Behind the photo are several others strewn across a desk and an open laptop with a family tree on it" title="Popular factual television programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? can act as a bulwark against idealised versions of the past, contends Claire Monk (Image by Getty Images)" /> The first two decades of the 21st century brought an unprecedented new wave of accessible public history, from free digitised resources (such as Old Bailey Online) via the rise of online family history to innovations in history television that engaged audiences with fact-based histories, primary sources and historical methods. The BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, launched in 2004, has now run for 22 seasons. Channel 4, particularly during the late Hamish Mykura’s tenure, excelled in innovations in primary-source-based historical drama and drama documentary. The series Georgian Underworld (2003) and City of Vice (2008), on the formation of the Bow Street Runners, were notable. However, the future of engaging public-history media for British audiences rests on institutional factors, not least the future of UK public-service broadcasting itself. Claire Monk is professor emerita of film and film culture at De Montfort University “In contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role” Nostalgia is neither inherently good nor bad. It helps us connect to the past, remembering friendships, experiences, places. It can help us work through regrets, offering insights that benefit us in the present. But nostalgia can produce sentimentality based on mischaracterisations of how things once were, painting the past in rose-tinted hues that bear little resemblance to historical reality. Either way, it produces very strong emotions. And in contemporary politics, nostalgia is playing a powerful role. We are seeing a surge in far-right nationalism, not least in the UK. Nostalgia feeds into this, weaponising ‘great’ moments in the past. These are taken selectively from British imperial history, evoking, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it, “the fantasy of a late return to the flag, family values, national character, imperial glory and the spirit of Palmerstonian gunboat diplomacy”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/GettyImages-526776478webready-1b1f2a8-e1772530266615.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A 17th‑century coastal scene showing a large group of men, women, and children gathered on a shoreline as they prepare to board ships. Several sailing vessels wait offshore, with small rowboats ferrying passengers to them. People wear cloaks, bonnets, and wide‑brimmed hats typical of the period. Behind them, cliffs rise to a fortified stone building overlooking the harbour. The mood suggests a significant departure or migration" title="A coloured engraving shows Huguenot refugees landing at Dover after toleration of Protestantism ended in France in 1685. Contrary to a populist narrative invoking false nostalgia, “Britain was never a homogeneous nation”, notes Anamik Saha (Image by Getty Images)" /> As Benjamin Jones notes, Paul Gilroy described this turn as “postcolonial melancholia”. The issue is not only how nationalists refabricate moments from history for their own ends, but also how they bind them to strong feelings of nostalgia. Crucially, Gilroy highlighted the racial dimension of this longing for a Britain before postwar immigration from the former colonies, when life was supposedly simpler, more peaceful and more homogeneous. Read more | Catholics vs Huguenots: your guide to the French Wars of Religion Postcolonial melancholia relies on a wilful amnesia about the past. Historians show us that Britain was never a homogeneous nation free from internal conflict. It has experienced waves of immigration over many centuries, following a familiar pattern: immigrants are initially met with fear and distrust before becoming naturally absorbed into British life and identity. Yet this is buried in popular representations of British history. Historical precision now struggles against nationalistic nostalgia that paints Britain’s past in broad, brutal strokes, obscuring important histories for political ends. Good history can salve postcolonial melancholia, helping the nation face and work through the troubled elements of its past. Anamik Saha is professor of race and media at Leeds University, and author of Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalin
There aren’t many theme parks that place statues of Soviet leaders next to Snow White and her seven dwarfs, but you’ll find one in southern Lithuania. Keith Lowe takes us on a tour of one of Europe’s most bizarre – and controversial – tourist attractions
I am standing in a clearing in a Lithuanian forest, surrounded by guard towers and electrified fences. To all intents and purposes, it looks like I’m in a Soviet prison camp. Up above me a loudspeaker barks out orders in Russian. I hurry along a corridor of barbed wire. Up ahead, peeping ominously through the trees, I can see the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun. But all is not as it seems. It doesn’t take long to realise that the loudspeaker is playing some sort of recording on a loop. The guards in the towers are not real either, but poorly disguised mannequins in theatre costume. And who are they guarding? Beneath them, in the barbed wire enclosure, is a row of Communist statues and half a dozen grazing llamas. Further along there are emus, cockatoos, a depressed-looking brown bear, and some statues of mass murderers. As for the gun, when I reach it, I discover that the only thing it is guarding is a children’s playground. Rifles and roundabouts, cockatoos and cattle-trucks, Lenin and llamas: welcome to Grūtas Park, Europe’s weirdest open-air museum. Its combination of terror and kitsch is so controversial that it almost got shut down. I first came here in 2018 as part of my research for a study of Second World War monuments. But I felt compelled to return, because I still can’t quite believe that this place actually exists. A brutal past Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like several of its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania began the 20th century as part of Russia and only gained its independence in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Just over 20 years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, it was invaded by Soviet troops all over again. Then came the Nazis, followed once again by the Soviets three years later – and with each new invasion came new brutality. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/42Y7B3TJ-ac517fe-e1772189389657.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white historical photograph of several military trucks driving down a city street lined with bare trees and tall buildings. The open‑back trucks are filled with uniformed soldiers wearing helmets, seated closely together as the convoy moves forward" title="Soviet troops enter the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, in June 1940. The country would be invaded by Nazi Germany a year later (Image by Alamy)" /> In 1945, the country was swallowed whole into the Soviet Union. Anyone who refused to accept the nation’s new Stalinist rulers was arrested, deported to Siberia, imprisoned or executed. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians resisted this new oppression. They took to the forests and fought pitched battles against the combined forces of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police but in the end the uprising was brutally crushed: according to the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to Soviet gulags between 1945 and 1950, where between a third and a half of them died. Read more | Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution? The Soviets then embarked on a program of Russification throughout the country. Russian speakers began moving into Lithuanian territories in large numbers; their descendants still live there today. Lithuanian culture was thoroughly purged of its bourgeois influences, and replaced by Socialist literature, art and architecture. Statues of Soviet heroes began to spring up in every town square, along with victory monuments and memorials to the glory of the Red Army. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/5GettyImages-839288220-170ae8f-e1772189538619.jpg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of a neatly arranged camp made up of small, identical buildings with pitched roofs and white picket fences. The buildings sit in rows on either side of a straight central path that leads to a decorative entrance structure with patterned columns. A few people walk along the paths or stand near the buildings. The surrounding landscape is flat and open, with only a few distant structures visible beyond the camp." title="A Soviet gulag in the Komi Republic, in what is now northwest Russia. Around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to such camps between 1945 and 1950 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Marx and mushrooms When the country finally regained its independence in 1990, almost all the monuments to Lenin and other Communist figures were torn down. Countless statues were decapitated, cut into pieces with blowtorches, or crushed into rubble. Some were even dynamited. In an attempt to save some of these sculptures for posterity, the new Lithuanian government decided to rescue some of them, with the vague idea that they might one day go on display in a museum somewhere. They invited institutions to bid for the right to display the statues, but unfortunately none of the nation’s museums was willing to take the project on without some kind of state funding. There was only one bid – from an entrepreneur named Viliumas Malinauskas – that did not ask for any government money at all. Malinauskas offered to pay all the transport, maintenance and restoration costs out of his own pocket. He was duly awarded the contract. This was where the controversy began. Because Malinauskas was not a historian, an art critic or a museum professional – or indeed anyone who had any background in this kind of work. In fact, he was a former wrestling champion who made his living as a mushroom farmer. He now has a multi-million-dollar business exporting his mushrooms all over the world. Some of his proposals for the sculpture park were quite bizarre. He wanted to build a special railway line, so that tourists from Vilnius could be brought here on cattle trucks, as if they were being deported to a Soviet-era gulag. He wanted to hire actors who would pretend to be soldiers, herding the tourists onto the trains. For the full gulag experience, Grūtas Park itself would be surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and the monuments would be displayed as if they were part of a Siberian prison camp. Unsurprisingly, critics began to call Malinauskas’s project a “Stalin theme park”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/6GettyImages-805141-514324c-e1772189666539.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man in a blue suit and red patterned tie sits outdoors on a large stone bust of a bearded man. His hand rests on the top of the sculpture. Beside him is another stone bust of a different bearded figure. Both sculptures are set on the ground in a wooded area with tall evergreen trees in the background." title="Grūtas Park’s founder, Viliumas Malinauskas, poses for the camera in 2001. The former wrestler wanted to build a special railway line so that tourists could travel to the park as though they were being transported to a gulag (Image by Getty Images)" /> It did not take long for the complaints to come rolling in. Local politicians opposed the building of the park. National politicians opposed the building of the rail line. A petition was drawn up denouncing the whole idea of his sculpture park, which was signed by Catholic Church officials, national NGOs, prominent academics, art professors and over a million other people around the world. “This part of history is full of suffering,” said one member of parliament, Juozas Galdikas, in 2000. “It should not be used for show business.” Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island Perhaps the strongest voice of opposition came from former victims of the regime. More than 30 groups of former partisans and political prisoners banded together to protest about the sculptures going on display. They accused Malinauskas of trying to profit from their misery and described the statues as “monsters from a horror film”. Some of them even went on hunger strike. “Imagine yourself as a resident in a small village,” said one former independence fighter named Leonas Kerosierius, “and someone came and attacked your village, killed your brother and raped your daughter. Would you allow your neighbour to build a park for these executioners and rapists, or make money off these crimes?” MPs pushed for a vote in parliament to take back the statues and keep them in State hands, and their resolution was accepted by a majority. But their victory was short-lived, because it was overturned by the Constitutional Court: Malinauskas had won the government contract fair and square, and Parliament had no right to take it away from him simply on a matter of taste. The most they could do was to create a government watchdog to oversee the construction of the sculpture park. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/2GettyImages-870579120-2d552aa-e1772189931245.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of 5 stone busts of men in a line. Behind them is a forest of tall fir trees" title="A small portion of the park’s historic busts. From left to right: Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Vincas Mickevičius (Lithuanian communist leader) and Joseph Stalin (Image by Getty Images)" /> The whole controversy quickly became international news. Not only did it feature in newspapers throughout the Baltic countries, but also in other parts of Europe. It even made the newspapers in America, parts of Asia and Australia. “Miss the Soviet Era? Come to Stalin World” ran the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald. Snow White and Stalin Grūtas Park officially opened to the public in 2001 and immediately proved a hit with visitors from all over Lithuania and beyond. Even before the official opening it had already seen around 100,000 visitors. Since then, it has added to its collection and become quite a well-established tourist destination. People still occasionally call this place ‘Stalin World’, but there is actually only one full-size statue of Stalin in the whole park. I found him just beyond the zoo, peeping out between the trees like some fairytale troll. (The comparison to a fairytale is not made randomly: in a nearby glade, closer to the children’s playground, there is also a set of sculptures representing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/7P1020624-Stalin-f9456c1-e1772190254160.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large statue of a man in a long military-style coat and cap, standing on a pedestal in a forest. Tree trunks in the foreground partially obscure the figure. The statue shows the man with a stern expression, one hand holding the lapel of his coat. Tall trees and undergrowth surround the statue, giving the scene a secluded, wooded setting." title="A statue of Stalin peers through the trees at Grūtas Park. The monument, which was removed from its original site in Vilnius 65 years ago, continues to be a source of controversy (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> It is easy to see why so many people became upset when the creation of this park was first announced. Many dissidents had spent their whole lives struggling against the Soviet system. In 1991 they had torn down these icons of Soviet power with great joy: it must have been deeply painful to see them so lovingly restored and put back on their pedestals, regardless of the setting. The resurrection of Stalin’s statue was perhaps the most painful thing of all. This man had been responsible for tens of millions of deaths across eastern Europe, and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians. He had not been on public display for decades. (This particular statue had been taken down by the Communists themselves, back in 1960.) And yet here he was, standing in a sunny glade, waiting for tourists to come and take selfies with him. Read more | Cold War summits: how USA & USSR leaders worked to end the conflict Critics pointed to a worrying trend in contemporary Russia for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s memory, with brand new memorials to him being raised in many parts of Russia, particularly since the start of the current war with Ukraine. What if this trend were to spread to Lithuania and beyond? What if Grūtas Park, too, were to become a 21st-century shrine to this monstrous dictator? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/P1020458-Snow-White-7-dwarves-ad174d4-e1772190445583.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of dark wooden sculptures is arranged among tall pine trees in a sunlit forest. Most of the carved figures are seated or kneeling, some with helmets or rounded headgear, while one taller figure stands upright at the center. The sculptures are spaced evenly across the forest floor. In the background, there are a few simple buildings with wooden or metal siding, one marked with graffiti. Sunlight filters through the trees, casting long shadows across the ground." title="Sculptures depicting Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs can be found close to the park’s full-size Stalin statue. “The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here,” says Keith Lowe (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> The power of ridicule Had this statue, and all the others, been given to one of the other bidders for the monument park contract, perhaps there would have been less controversy. Europos Parkas, in Vilnius, wanted to exhibit the statues purely as works of art, alongside a whole variety of avant-garde creations by artists from all over the world. Here, perhaps, the aesthetic qualities of a Stalin statue might have been divorced from its political meaning. The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius also applied for the contract. It would have displayed the monuments in its main hall and courtyard. Had Stalin’s statue been placed here, it would have been seen alongside an extensive exhibition dedicated to his crimes. Many of those who protested against Grūtas Park wanted the museum to have won the bid precisely because it would have put the benign looking statues of figures like Stalin in a much, much grimmer context. But there is something about the way that Grūtas Park displays its statues that is enormously refreshing. Seeing Stalin with a squirrel on his head takes away some of the nightmarish power he continues to exercise over us from beyond the grave. When birds are nesting in Lenin’s fingers, and children are climbing over the guns that were once aimed at Lithuanian partisans, these symbols of state power no longer seem as frightening as they once did. This seems to be exactly what Viliumas Malinauskas is trying to achieve. In an interview with the Guardian shortly before the park opened, the proprietor was unapologetic about his peculiar approach to Lithuania’s troubled history. “People can come here and joke about the sculptures,” he said. “And that will mean Lithuania is no longer afraid of Communism.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/9P1020459-2-Playground-with-military-van-2d8059e-e1772190762404.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colorful playground structure sits in a sandy, wooded clearing. It includes a red‑and‑green climbing frame, a curved yellow slide, and a green cylindrical tunnel element. Tall pine trees surround the area, casting dappled light on the ground. In the background, partly hidden by trees and bushes, an old green vehicle—possibly a van or small truck—rests near the edge of the clearing." title="A children’s climbing frame is sited metres away from a disused military vehicle. Does such a juxtaposition make Lithuania’s troubled past seem less frightening? (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> Grūtas Park is a bizarre mix of playground, zoo and atrocity museum. It trivialises the past in the most appalling ways, especially with its Disneyfied guard towers and barbed wire. Some of the museum displays in its barrack-style huts are more nostalgic than critical of the regime. And its commercial exploitation of Lithuania’s painful past is questionable to say the least: I managed to buy myself a Stalin mug and a Stalin keyring in the gift shop on my way out. In fact, there are so many things about Grūtas Park that could be considered offensive that I hardly know where to start; and yet somehow, through its sheer banality, it comes closer to freeing Lithuania from its history than any of the more serious and thoughtful monuments that have been so carefully produced in other parts of Europe. The magic ingredient is ridicule. I’m not sure how much this ridicule was ever intended by the park’s founder and owner, and how much is just a function of a ridiculous set-up. Nevertheless, it is there, and it is a powerful antidote to the atmosphere of fear that plagued this country for so many years. Keith Lowe is an author and former military history publisher who has spent more than 20 years writing about the Second World War and its aftermath. His most recent book is Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024)
"Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"
"Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events", writes Michael Wood
Recently, I read a news item about the jobs most likely to disappear because of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). And first among them, along with translators, are historians! Now I’m biased of course, but in times like these, when the president of the United States himself can tell the world that Ukraine started the war with Russia, it seems to me we need historians more than ever. In the face of spreading authoritarian rule and growing rightwing populism, good history is a refuge and a beacon. Complicating matters further, it often seems as if the owners of the mass media, billionaires who wish to shape debates, don’t want historians any more than they want independent journalists. It seems that from their perspective, the less historically literate the people are, the better. But in an open democratic society, we need informed historical perspectives, the painstaking interrogation of sources, and public explanation and interpretation. History is not only entertainment. In an age of lies and disinformation, history acts as our reality check. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? And history, don’t forget, is not a fireside job. Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events, in the moment. Think of Thucydides writing as the Peloponnesian War raged, or Ibn Khaldun, lowered down a wall in a basket to parley with the monstrous Timur (Tamerlane) at the siege of Damascus. Or what about the heroic Emanuel Ringelblum? Samuel D Kassow’s account of Ringelblum’s efforts to record the experiences of those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto – Who Will Write Our History? – is surely one of the most staggering books about why we write. To be a true historian is to make a kind of pact with the living and the dead – and with future generations. We have a duty to tell the truth. A new book brings all this into sharp relief. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a distinguished French historian, the author of The Middle East: A Political History from 395 to the Present and Gaza: A History. He has made many visits to Gaza since 1980. But now, one of the big problems for our understanding of the Gazan catastrophe is the Israeli government’s refusal to allow independent journalists – even Israeli ones – into Gaza after war broke out in 2023. Since then, we have depended on the endeavours of incredibly brave Palestinian journalists to tell us what is happening – and Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. As a historian, Filiu decided he couldn’t write about the present crisis without being there and talking to the people on the ground. No naïve youngster, on the night of his 63rd birthday, he entered Gaza with a humanitarian group, Médecins Sans Frontières, and as a fluent Arabic speaker he was an active member of their team. He spent 33 days and 34 nights “to see and experience for myself, to retrieve not only the meaning of words in Gaza, but also the simple values of our shared humanity”. Read more | Nineteen Eighty-Four: to the future or to the past? His book is called A Historian in Gaza. It should be read by all who aspire to be historians. In its pages, we read of things we never hear in our news broadcasts. For example, it illuminates the complex conflicts within Gaza between feuding clan groups. These disputes have roots in the client system introduced by the Ottomans and continued by the British, a kind of divide-and-rule approach where competing groups were largely allowed to get on with running the territory on a day-to-day basis. Here we see the desperate Palestinian people suffering under multiple burdens: bombed and shelled by Israeli forces and pushed towards starvation, but also brutalised by competing Islamist groups and extorted by rival militias. Most of all, though, it provides the material for us to judge for ourselves the real meaning of the contested words and ideas we see on our TV screens: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. What does the historian do? At root, the craft is about judgment. What does this source say? Is it true? What is the writer’s bias? Can I prove it? Am I accepting an account because it conforms with how I see the world? More than a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, A Historian in Gaza is about the nature of power in our time. Because of the hugely expanding reach of social media and its growing influence on the practice of democracy itself, George Orwell’s famous warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four is truer now than ever before. To control the past is to control the future; control the present and you control the past. Forget AI: never has the role of the historian been more urgent. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
How do civilisations collapse? That was the question at the heart of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Two hundred and fifty years after it was published, Guy de la Bédoyère argues that Gibbon’s magnum opus remains a landmark in the writing of history
Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beginning the history of the United States. But back in the old world, another, rather more modest event would have a profound influence on cultural history. For 1776 was also the year that the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in London. And though it may not have spawned a nation, there’s little doubt that the book’s release was a landmark moment in the writing of history. Authored by Edward Gibbon, an essayist and, at this time, Whig MP for Liskeard, this epic work eventually grew to encompass the story of the Roman empire from the accession of the emperor Trajan in AD 98 through to 1453, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and the rump of the Eastern empire fell. The last of its six volumes appeared in 1788 just before another tumultuous year in global history, 1789, when the opening salvos were fired in the French Revolution. What, in the year of its 250th anniversary, are we to make of Decline and Fall? Is it coincidental that a book written at a time of rebellion, and where so much of the narrative is about political intrigues and the loss of power, connected with 18th-century readers? And how did a history based on limited resources that few scholars would refer to today escape its time to become a classic? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-122219029webready-2206e03-e1771851490986.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A life‑sized marble statue of a Roman leader stands upright against a carved stone wall. The figure wears ornate armor decorated with reliefs, including a central face and small mythological scenes. A heavy cloak drapes over the left shoulder and arm, adding a sense of movement to the otherwise rigid pose. The right arm is raised, holding a scroll that suggests authority or command. The statue’s expression is calm and formal, and the smooth, pale marble contrasts with the textured architectural backdrop" title="Trajan’s reign marked the beginning of a time when, wrote Gibbon, the Roman empire presided over the “most civilised portion of mankind” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Young and lonely To begin to answer these questions, it helps to know a little about Decline and Fall’s author. Gibbon was born in Putney in 1737 to a family of considerable means. But for all his privilege, there’s more than a suggestion of loneliness in his early life. His relationship with his mother was troubled. None of his six siblings survived to adulthood. He attended Westminster School and Magdalen College, Oxford, but is better understood as someone who was largely self-educated as a result of his extensive reading. His decision to convert to Catholicism in 1753 brought his time at Oxford to an abrupt end, but under threat of being disinherited by his father, he swiftly returned to Protestantism. There’s a sense at this stage of Gibbon failing to find a purpose in life. Or perhaps, bearing in mind his bookish creativity, a failure to find the right project. This would not arrive until 1764 when, travelling around Europe on a Grand Tour, Gibbon reached “the great object of [my] pilgrimage”, Rome. In Decline and Fall, he would famously note, “It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near 20 years of my life”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1649172Gibbonwebready-365c81c-e1771851649321.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of six books standing side by side, with their spines facing the viewer. Each book is brown, red and green in colour with gold lettering" title="The six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall were published in the 12 years between the American and French revolutions. The author declared that the book itself documented “a revolution which will ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the Earth” (Image by Peter Harrington)" /> Gibbon had found his calling. By the end of the 1760s, he had begun the work that would define him. His preface suggested he knew exactly what he was doing as he explained how he intended to cover the 13 and a half centuries from AD 98 to 1453 by dividing his subject into different periods. He began by explaining: “The first of these periods may be traced from the age of Trajan and the Antonines, when the Roman monarchy, having attained its full strength and maturity, began to verge towards its decline; and will extend to the subversion of the Western empire, by the barbarians of Germany and Scythia, the rude ancestors of the most polished nations of modern Europe. This extraordinary revolution, which subjected Rome to the power of a Gothic conqueror, was completed about the beginning of the sixth century.” From there, Gibbon planned to move on to a second period starting with Justinian (reigned 527–65), who was emperor for close to four decades, and lasting to the reign of Charlemagne, who founded the Carolingian empire in AD 800. A third period would take the story from this Frankish revival of the Western empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Read more | Meet the “grossly underappreciated” Roman emperor who became the enemy of the ancient world Blind faith Gibbon baulked at the prospect of completing the massive task he had set himself. “I dare not presume to give any assurances,” he warned his readers. Yet for all his modesty, there was a sense of purpose about his writing. From the off, he wanted to argue that the Roman empire fell due to a combination of Christianity’s corrosive influence, which eroded civic ambition and responsibilities, and barbarian invasions, which acted as the final blow to an already weakened state. He believed that Christianity redirected the focus of citizens from worldly concerns to the afterlife, diminishing their commitment to the state. He also suggested that other internal factors – like despotism, corruption and military weakness – contributed to the empire’s internal decay before the external pressures became overwhelming. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL206171webready-bdcce3f-e1771852336666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A painted portrait of an 18th‑century man wearing a red coat with gold buttons, a white cravat, and a powdered wig. He faces slightly to the side against a dark background, which highlights his pale face, formal clothing, and the refined style typical of the period" title="Edward Gibbon shown in a portrait from c1779. “He deserves to be admired for as long as there is anyone around to read him,” writes Guy de la Bédoyère (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Gibbon didn’t think he was writing about a remote and arcane subject. He believed that, “In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the Earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind”, neatly brushing over the total dependence of the Roman empire on slavery. The empire’s decline and fall was, Gibbon said, “a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the Earth”. Here lay his central point. The collapse of the Roman empire, however long it had taken, had a decisive effect on the world that followed. It was, therefore, a lesson for all time in how civilisations can fall to pieces and what this might mean for those who follow. Although there are countless observations that could be made about Gibbon’s use of ancient sources, and the limitations both of his technique and the evidence he had to hand, it would be difficult to quarrel with his interest in trying to understand why and how a state could fail. This shouldn’t blind us to Decline and Fall’s limitations. One of those limitations emerges during Gibbon’s discussions of the invasion of Britain in the first century AD (in which the author looked back to see how the Roman empire grew to become the dominant force of the second century). Of the British tribes, he noted that “while they fought singly, they were successively subdued”. This is an instantly identifiable line borrowed and translated from Agricola – written by the Roman historian Tacitus and named after the general who helped mastermind the conquest of northern Britain. Read more | Roman invasion of Britain: did the Britons ignore them? Unattributed borrowings like this were commonplace at the time. In one sense, they were homages, but they also served to showcase the author’s learning and easy familiarity with classical texts. Gibbon may have expected, even wanted, his readers to notice this kind of copying and pasting, but it also illustrates an uncritical approach to his source material. A few lines on, Gibbon discussed the recall of Agricola, despite “his superior merit”, from his post as governor of Britain in the AD 80s. Agricola was Tacitus’s father-in-law, and the biography Tacitus wrote was an unashamed hagiography. Gibbon simply copied Tacitus’s very evident bias and accepted the criticisms of the last Flavian emperor, Domitian (ruled 81–96). Happy days? Gibbon was prone to making sweeping judgments. Among the most famous lines in the entire book is his assertion that, “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”. This statement may be well known but that doesn’t mean it was correct. As I alluded to earlier, we now have a far more graphic understanding of the reality of Roman slavery. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2181025710webready-7b1c152-e1771851899984.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble statue of a man with curly hair and a beard, looking down towards the left with a serious expression on his face" title="Gibbon saw in the second-century emperor Commodus a man unable to cope with the colossal responsibilities of imperial power (Image by Getty Images)" /> Yet Gibbon could also be astute. His stance on Commodus – the much-maligned emperor assassinated in a palace coup on the last day of 192 – showed an understanding of the vulnerability of the imperial system when the emperor lacked the personal resources to cope with the enormous demands of the job. “Commodus was not, as he has been represented, a tiger born with an insatiate thirst of human blood, and capable, from his infancy, of the most inhuman actions,” observed Gibbon. “Nature had formed him of a weak rather than a wicked disposition.” Gibbon’s descriptions of Commodus also reveal a pithiness and a joy in the use of language that helps explain Decline’s and Fall’s initial success. There are many examples of Gibbon’s meticulous turns of phrase but only room here to highlight a small number. Commodus’s downfall was precipitated by him having “discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal, and a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace” since childhood. When Emperor Septimius Severus died at York on campaign in 211, Gibbon described the moment thus: “The declining health and last illness of Severus inflamed the wild ambition and black passions of [his son] Caracalla’s soul.” We might choose different words today, but Gibbon’s meaning remains obvious. He was foreshadowing what came next. Caracalla, “the common enemy of mankind”, now embarked on a tyrannical rule that lasted until his own murder in 217. The only historical figure whom Caracalla admired, Gibbon tells us, was Alexander the Great. But “in no one action of his life did Caracalla express the faintest resemblance of the Macedonian hero, except in the murder of a great number of his own and of his father’s friends”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-464435571webready-2521f5e-e1771851785523.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A marble bust of a bearded man with thick, curly hair, shown from the chest up. His expression is intense, with furrowed brows and a slightly turned head that gives a sense of movement. The sculpted curls, textured beard, and draped garment are finely detailed, highlighting the craftsmanship of the classical style" title="Gibbon reserved some of his most stinging criticisms for the emperor Caracalla, whom he labelled “the common enemy of mankind” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Maxims of persecution Gibbon also had sharp words for Constantine I, who famously converted to Christianity and issued an edict banning the persecution of Christians in 313. What this shift meant in practice, Gibbon contended, was that Christians themselves became oppressors: “The emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the Catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity.” Like so many passages of Decline and Fall, Gibbon’s writings on the impact of Christianity on Rome were phrased beautifully. But that didn’t stop them triggering a firestorm of criticism. Leading the charge was the theologian George Travis, who outlined his grave objections to the book in a series of letters published in 1785. Travis’s condemnation centred on a specific passage in the Bible known as the Johannine Comma. This was a phrase affirming the unity of the Holy Trinity that appeared in the Epistles of John, but was absent from ancient Greek manuscripts. Travis defended the Comma as authentic scripture. Yet, in his discussion of the conversion of “barbarians” to Christianity in Decline and Fall, Gibbon labelled it a “pious fraud”. Travis wrote to Gibbon to say: “It will become one who wishes to live to posterity as a historian, to consider well how he can justify himself either in literary candor [sic] or Christian charity, for accusing men so evidently conscientious… of the complicated crime of the falsification of Scripture!” Travis went on to accuse Gibbon of “bigotry” because of his “perverse adherence to any opinion of any kind, without giving to the evidence on the contrary part, an open hearing”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1336622679webready-094aff8-e1771852165870.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A circular mosaic showing the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River. At the centre, John the Baptist pours water over Jesus, who stands waist‑deep in the river. A white dove descends above them, symbolizing the Holy Spirit. The scene is surrounded by brightly colored, gold‑accented figures of angels with halos arranged in a radial pattern, creating a sense of sacred ceremony and ornate Byzantine style" title="A fifth-century mosaic shows Jesus Christ being baptised in the river Jordan, which is depicted as a pagan god. Edward Gibbon noted the ease with which early Christians made the transition from the oppressed to the oppressors (Image by Getty Images)" /> Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Travis story is how the affair might have inspired Jane Austen. As he dashed off his pen to slate Gibbon, Travis included the phrases “partiality and prejudiced” and “certain truths which you affirm to be now universally acknowledged”. In her History of England (1791), a piece of juvenilia poking fun at school history books, the 15-year-old Austen referred to herself as a “partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian”. In addition, Austen’s celebrated words “pride and prejudice” can be found in Decline and Fall when Gibbon refers to them as a cause of slavery. Read more | Divided they fell: how war, revolution and sectarianism led to the end of the Ottoman empire In the knives-out scholarly argument that followed the clash between Gibbon and Travis, Gibbon’s view prevailed with the support of an ancient Greek scholar called Richard Porson, who produced evidence suggesting that the Comma was a later insertion. But the episode demonstrates how, in its time, Decline and Fall was hugely controversial. Gibbon was believed by many, especially the clergy, to be attacking the very institution of the church. Resentment of Gibbon’s perceived criticism of Christianity proved enduring. The Rev HH Milman edited an 1845 edition of Decline and Fall and contributed a foreword in which he warned the reader: “We may deplore the bias of his mind; we may ourselves be on our guard against the danger of being misled, and be anxious to warn less wary readers against the same perils.” While he was gracious enough to acknowledge that Gibbon “leaves us the materials for forming a fairer judgment”, Milman insisted “that great misrepresentation which pervades his history” was a “false estimate” of the influence of Christianity. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-566460025webready-1a85702-e1771852243572.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A pencil sketch depicting a woman dressed in a white dress and cap, with her arms crossed. She has dark curly hair escaping out the front of the cap and is looking towards the left" title="A c1810 portrait of Jane Austen. Was the title of her bestselling novel inspired by Edward Gibbon’s prose? (Image by Getty Images)" /> Churchillian praise If conservative religious voices criticised Gibbon, Conservative politicians have often expressed their admiration. Winston Churchill, who was inspired by Gibbon’s self-education, said he had “devoured Gibbon”. He praised Decline and Fall and “was immediately dominated by both the story and the style”. In more recent times, Gibbon appeared at the centre of another controversy. In a 2021 interview, Boris Johnson claimed the fall of Rome was “largely the result of uncontrolled immigration”, an argument derived ultimately from Gibbon. Johnson’s warning that Europe was itself not immune to a similar fate was widely criticised for being over-simplistic, outdated and provocative. Where, then, does all this leave Edward Gibbon? If he did wish “to live to posterity as a historian”, he succeeded. Does it matter that he is now regarded as being out of date? Of course not. Decline and Fall is a valuable artefact of its own time, as is every history book. Glibly criticising works for such a failing is the last refuge of idle academics indulging the conceit that they have themselves pulled off the impossible feat of eternal and indisputable objectivity. If there was no subjectivity or bias in history there would be no history, and instead merely a series of statements of fact. Decline and Fall is also a magnificent monument to a pre-digital era when assembling a book of such epic complexity and range had all to be done by hand and in person. That Gibbon both managed this – and to do so with a memorable use of his native language – means he deserves to be admired for as long as there is anyone around to read him. As so often with the creators of great works, Gibbon’s life after Decline and Fall was an anti-climax compounded by serious ill-health and loneliness. He had never married, his father obstructing the one union – with the salon host and writer Suzanne Curchord – Gibbon had wished to pursue. Gibbon died in 1794, aged only 56 and afflicted with gout and several other ailments. He is buried in Fletching, East Sussex. When he laid down his pen in 1787, Gibbon said in his final paragraph that he hoped his readers would be excited by “a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind”. He acknowledged his own imperfections, and the inadequacy of the book compared to his own wishes but delivered it “to the curiosity and candour of the public”. And there it has remained ever since. Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit, many about the Roman world. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys: His Private Revelations (Abacus, 2025) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars
“Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”. Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year. In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It’s not that Britain narrowly escaped the extremism that swept across Europe in the interwar years – it never came even vaguely close. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-545715027webready-1d9cdc7-e1771233358771.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a large group of people, dressed in long coats, scarves and hats marching through the street. They all have sad, concentrated looks on their faces" title="The National Hunger March (1932) saw men and women converge on London from around the country. The Great Depression caused a great deal of hardship, but Britons weren’t as badly affected as many other nations (Image by Getty Images)" /> Safe across the water There were multiple reasons why Britain didn’t succumb to the appeals of fascism or other extreme ideologies. There was the security of being an island, and the stability of a long existence as a nation within fixed borders. There was the fact that, horrific as the numbers of British fatalities were in the First World War, they were dwarfed by those of other combatant nations. Similarly, although the Great Depression brought hardship to many, Britain was not affected as badly as other countries. There was also the nature of the Labour Party, committed to the parliamentary process, as were the trade unions. And indeed the nature of the Conservative Party under the One-Nation leadership of Stanley Baldwin – as well as the electoral system that made it so difficult for rival parties to emerge. Read more | When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained In his 1937 account of life in the industrial north, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made the suggestion that “cheap luxuries” kept the working class quiescent. “It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,” he wrote. But low-level consumerism was not unique to Britain. If the country chose “to make the best of things”, it was surely because the national culture was already averse to radical disruption. It’s relevant, for example, that this was the great era of voluntary associations. There had been working men’s social clubs in industrial towns and cities for decades, but numbers grew substantially in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1922, its diamond jubilee year, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union could boast 2,300 affiliated clubs with more than a million members. The Women’s Institute, which was founded in Canada and had reached Britain during the war, grew in the 1930s to around 300,000 members. Rotary Clubs, founded in Chicago, had around 19,000 members, and the League of Nations Union more than 400,000. Perhaps most important of all was the British Legion, which merged various ex-servicemen’s groups in 1921. Within a decade, it had a membership of 300,000 – around one in 10 of those who had served in the forces. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2170737679webready-ac4bf6e-e1771233487438.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of five women standing around a long table with a white tablecloth on it. There are various items on the table, including some wicker baskets and a set of scales. The woman in the centre, an older woman dressed in dark clothing, is holding up a bunch of carrots" title="Members of the Women’s Institute gather at a garden show in 1922. By the end of the 1930s, Britain’s WI had grown to around 300,000 members (Image by Getty Images)" /> Beyond these big networks, Britain nurtured a vast array of local societies and groups dedicated to single interests: photography, prison reform, amateur dramatics, vegetable growing, jazz records and a thousand other issues and hobbies. What they had in common, pointed out the novelist Phyllis Bentley, was a high level of self-regulation. “Each of these societies has a properly elected committee and chairman,” she wrote, “and conducts its business by means of an agenda, a proper procedure of moving and voting resolutions, an annual report and a balance sheet open to all members.” The British, she observed, were a people “unexcelled in the proper conduct of public business by entirely voluntary but strictly self-regulated methods”. This was the institutionalised form of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a term coined by the philosopher and politician to express the importance of societal bonds formed at a local and family level. There were also political clubs – some 2,000 Conservative, nearly 1,000 Liberal, the early stirrings of Labour – but it was the institutions that weren’t based on party that really mattered. The non-aligned status of the various societies allowed for diversity of opinion, and for finding common cause. The societies operated on the basis of cooperation and coalition. It was from voluntary societies and trade unions, argued Baldwin, that the people had learned “the elements and principles of a democracy” which “they will never let go”. Democratic practice was thus embedded in everyday life, far beyond politics. Cultural caution Indeed, there was a striking absence of politics in British social life, and even more so in cultural life. The cinema, for example, was regulated by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body whose only remit was not to offend and which approved nothing more provocative than resilience in the face of adversity. The espousal of doctrines of revolution or free love were banned, as were “references to controversial politics”, including “relations between capital and labour”. So a proposed movie of Walter Greenwood’s Depression-era novel Love on the Dole was rejected by the BBFC for having “too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty”. Permitted, however, was the comedy Off the Dole in which George Formby was “sacked” by the Labour Exchange after four years of not working, and which displayed nothing more contentious than the gentlest of political satire. (“A member of parliament is a man who gives your life for his country.”) Also banned by the BBFC was anything “calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign people”, as well as “the insistence on the inferiority of the coloured races” and “scenes calculated to inflame racial hatred”. Read more | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions It was a very British take on censorship, quite unlike that of most European countries. It wasn’t any particular political viewpoint that was banned, but politics as a whole. “We may take pride,” said Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC, in 1937, “in observing that there is not a single film in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.” The BBFC had been established – and was still run – by the industry itself and, although its writ was never challenged, it had no statutory authority. This system of self-regulation was, acknowledged Labour politician Herbert Morrison, “a curious arrangement” but, he added, “The British have a very great habit of making curious arrangements that work very well.” In any event, it was surely preferable to the intense government control seen in Germany under Joseph Goebbels, or in Russia, where the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, was executed as a traitor in 1938 for not doing his job well enough. Reithian values An equally curious arrangement governed the BBC, founded in 1922, which operated first as a private company and then as a public-service corporation under royal charter. It had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain and became the most significant cultural institution in the country. By the end of the 1920s there were 3 million radio licences, 9 million by the end of the thirties – virtually every household in the country had a radio. It was a little odd, though. Even in its early commercial days, the BBC was never a conventional operation that responded to audience demand. Nor did it ever become an organ of government. Instead, general manager (later director-general) John Reith created his own vision of public service broadcasting, and mostly resisted external pressure from those who wished to shape this new medium. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-613463542webready-2ec1964-e1771233639521.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man wearing a white shirt, dark sweater vest and striped tie, sitting at a desk with papers in front of him. To the right is a large microphone with the letters BBC on the front" title="Announcers such as Alvar Lidell (above), the man who told the nation of Edward VIII’s abdication, were trusted figures whose work helped bind the nation together (Image by Getty Images)" /> There were restrictions, of course. Like the cinema, radio was not a place for disruption. The government, explained Reith, had given “an explicit instruction to avoid anything in the nature of religious, political or industrial controversy”. There wasn’t even a great deal of news. The newspaper industry, fearful of being made redundant, successfully lobbied the government to ensure that the first radio bulletin of the day wasn’t broadcast until 7pm, so that it wouldn’t harm sales of morning or evening titles. That curfew was broken – never to return – during the nine-day General Strike of 1926, when independent newspaper production was suspended and the radio became the chief source of news for many. During the dispute, Reith complained about the government – “I do not think they treat me altogether fairly,” he wrote in his diary – but he strove to keep coverage calm and detached. Even in this moment of national crisis, the BBC was not a propaganda station – largely because Baldwin overruled those in his cabinet (most notably Winston Churchill) who wanted to commandeer the airwaves. More broadly, as political coverage expanded, the BBC allowed for a variety of voices but had a clear bias towards parliamentary democracy: communists and fascists were seldom heard on the radio. It was ecumenical but definitely mainstream. So too was its approach to religion. Despite his own Presbyterian faith, Reith believed that religious broadcasting should be based on “a non-sectarian Christianity, confined, in respect of doctrine, to those simplest essentials to which all Christians of the west can adhere”. With only one national channel, augmented in most regions by a local station, the intention was to occupy a shared middle ground. As with the cinema, there was no wish to ruffle feathers. And, also like the cinema, the BBC was essentially self-regulating. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-590536530webready-693ada3-e1771233743610.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in uniform holding tightly onto the raised arm of a woman, who is holding a gun above her head. She is dressed in a collared shirt and long skirt. Behind them is a set of windows" title="Catherine Lacey stars in Judgment Day in 1937, at a time of tight control over what could be seen on theatre stages (Image by Getty Images)" /> For other cultural forms, there existed a patchwork of censorship that had evolved over generations without any sense of logic or coherence. The London stage was under the tight control of the Lord Chamberlain, while variety theatres were overseen by local councils. Books and exhibitions required no prior approval but were subject to the Obscene Publications Act. The Post Office was empowered to intercept mail, and customs officers to seize material brought in from abroad. None of this was draconian. It simply smothered: a comfort blanket that insulated against conflict. The resultant lack of cultural engagement with burning political issues on stage, screen and radio was part of the reason why the country felt – and was – so much more stable in the 1930s than most of Europe. Culture in Britain was far quieter than in its neighbours. There was something more that underpinned these cultural manifestations: a conviction that dictatorship ran against the grain of the nation. “Autocracy is abhorrent to the British mind,” wrote a columnist in the West Sussex Gazette in 1933, “and the kind we see in operation in Germany seems to us almost incredible.” The totalitarian state, with its intrusion into private life, offended a culture that had always prided itself on privacy and independence; somehow, it all looked so alien. The leader-worship accorded to Hitler, Stalin and their ilk – the ubiquity of their images on posters, placards and public portraits – felt wrong. That role was already taken by the monarchy, whose iconography was woven into the social fabric, from the national anthem to banknotes and coins, postage stamps and pillar boxes. The words “an English Hitler”, reflected novelist Louis Golding in 1931, were “comically contradictory of each other”. (Which didn’t stop people from trying them out: the previous year, Labour minister Arthur Greenwood had used precisely that phrase to describe Winston Churchill.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2630393webready-0ec36cd-e1771233973188.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man dressed in a black uniform with a wide belt around his waist. He is standing above a crowd, shouting out to them with his right arm raised and curled towards his face" title="Oswald Mosley, far-right leader of the British Union of Fascists, addresses his supporters. The party never won a single parliamentary seat (Image by Getty Images)" /> No need to get shirty Equally alien, if not downright silly, were fascism’s quasi-military uniforms – all those monochrome shirts. “The number of nations that may be led to salvation, generally an undemocratic salvation, need to be limited only by the number of colours that shirts may be dyed,” mocked the Roscommon Herald. They became a standing joke in the literature of the time. There were Green Shirts in John Buchan’s 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds and again in Richmal Compton’s William the Dictator, White Shirts in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (both 1938), and unspecified Imperial Shirts in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940). Best of all, in his 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse introduced Roderick Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley who leads the Black Shorts. As Gussie Fink-Nottle explains: “There were no shirts left.” In the same book, Wodehouse ridiculed “those pictures in the papers of dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words”. That was another part of the problem with such figures: the posturing and the bragging rants looked out of place in a British context, in the same way that fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism doesn’t work in a home counties accent. When Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, he replaced his conventional tweeds and suits with a black polo-neck sweater tucked into black trousers, held up by a wide black leather belt, and his onstage persona adopted a more declamatory tone and exaggerated arm gestures. But he looked unconvincing, as though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatics society show. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2634991webready-fc16f26-e1771233862476.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a short man in a suit and bowler hat walking in an exaggerated manner, arm in arm with a taller woman dressed in a long coat. They both look excited. Behind them is a large crowd of people, cheering the on" title="Irene Dipper and Billy Pease do ‘The Lambeth Walk’ in London, 1938. While the song was wildly popular in Britain, in Nazi Germany it was labelled “degenerate” (Image by Getty Images)" /> If there was a single cultural symbol of Britain’s instinctive distrust of the dictator, it was perhaps ‘The Lambeth Walk’ – the song, and accompanying dance, that swept the country in 1938. A highlight of the musical Me and My Girl it was a simple and instantly catchy tune that cried out to be whistled cheerily by postmen and plumbers. The lyrics were even simpler, notable for the shout of “Oi!” and for the happy-go-lucky bridge: “Everything free and easy; do as you darn well pleasey.” The song seemed to speak of a people free from an overbearing state – an anomaly in an increasingly authoritarian world. And it was embraced across the whole of society – danced, according to Mass Observation reports, “in Mayfair ballrooms, suburban dance halls, cockney parties and village hops”. Read more | From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right Some 350,000 copies of the sheet music for ‘The Lambeth Walk’ were sold in Britain in its first year, and it was exported successfully, too. It was recorded by dozens of artists including American bandleaders Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, as well as Europe’s greatest jazz group, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. As the continent lurched towards another conflict in the year of Munich and the idea of “peace for our time” proved illusory, The Times predicted that the song would “be the ‘Tipperary’ of the next world war”. In Nazi Germany, however, the song encountered stiff opposition. It was banned at the Shrovetide Carnival festivities in Munich and at the University of Heidelberg – where Joseph Goebbels had been awarded his PhD – and Hermann Göring reportedly forbade Luftwaffe bands from playing it. “This is degenerate music and the people who dance it are also degenerate,” thundered Der SA-Mann, newspaper of the Brownshirts. From a British perspective, this was a fundamental clash of cultures and values. “There is nothing free and easy in Nazi Germany,” said the Liverpool Echo. “‘The Lambeth Walk’ must seem out of place in the land of the goose step.” If that comparison seems a little fanciful – perhaps trivial – it made sense at the time. And even Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, drew exactly the same conclusion. “I understand that Hitler regards the Lambeth Walk as too democratic a dance for Germany,” he said. “All they can do there is the goose step.” Alwyn Turner is senior lecturer in cultural and literary history at the University of Chichester. His new book is A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars (Profile, January 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
The prince and the brothel: 6 scandals that rocked the British monarchy
At a time when the royal family is under significant strain, historians shine a spotlight on some of the biggest crises to have enveloped the British monarchy over the past three centuries
The prince, the brothel and a culture war Katie Hindmarch-Watson describes a sex scandal that consumed Queen Victoria’s grandson On 7 July 1889, a policeman arrested a sometime telegraph boy, Henry Newlove, at his mother’s house in Camden Town. Newlove had been recruiting younger telegraph boys at London’s Central Telegraph Office to provide sexual services for affluent male clients at a brothel on Cleveland Street. Defiant, Newlove said that he thought it “very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk around free… Why, Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street; so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.” Within months, Newlove was in prison and Somerset was in exile. Yet Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, triumphed in a libel suit that exonerated him from any “gross indecency”, and Colonel Jervois received no further mention in police records or the press. However, another man in high position became the focus of speculation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL11686324webready-dfc0737-e1770036564257.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A newspaper depicting several scenes of men in top hats and young boys standing in the street" title="The Cleveland Street Scandal, as reported in The Illustrated Police News on 25 January 1890. The affair – which embroiled Prince Albert Victor – “evolved into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> We still don’t really know why Prince Albert Victor – or ‘Eddy’, grandson of Queen Victoria and oldest son of the Prince of Wales – became linked to the story. Arthur Somerset had been his father’s equerry, but there is no evidence that the two men associated with one another, and no proof has emerged one way or another about Eddy’s propensity for sex with teenage telegraph boys. The Cleveland Street Scandal evolved from Newlove’s revelations into a morality tale about rich men’s predatory vices, unequal treatment before the law, and the public’s right to private revelations. Prince Eddy was a potent symbol in a class culture war that pitted aristocratic privilege against aspiring youths in a modernising city. The rumours were enough to spark royal intervention. The Prince of Wales instructed courtiers to keep his son’s name out of the British press, and crown prosecutors used coded language to discuss the persistent suggestion that Eddy was involved. Eddy’s death of pneumonia in 1892 quashed any further need to protect his reputation – but something shady still clings to his memory. Katie Hindmarch-Watson is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University Did Queen Victoria marry her servant? When the widowed monarch fell for the son of a farmer, the nation was scandalised, says Fern Riddell Just a few years after Prince Albert died, the widowed Victoria found herself in the middle of a huge scandal. She was accused of falling in love – and even marrying – her Highland servant, John Brown. For the Victorians, the idea that their monarch might be having a passionate love affair with the son of an Aberdeenshire farmer was truly shocking. Their society was ruled by class, and John was very clearly outside Victoria’s. Her court despised John for his ordinary background, and her government was convinced that he was a threat to both her security and that of the crown. Rumours filled the newspapers that Victoria was mad, and that John was her keeper. Meanwhile, gossips insinuated that he was using supernatural powers to control her and make her fall in love with him. Read more | How I uncovered Victoria's secret love: historian Fern Riddell explains all For 20 years, John stood at Victoria’s side in silence, enduring personal attacks in the press and the threat of violence from Victoria’s public, who believed that he was the reason she was living in seclusion. But Victoria refused to listen to the criticism. She didn’t care who hated John – her family, her court, her government or her people. She refused to be parted from him. By the time John died in 1883, many were convinced that they had privately married. When Victoria attempted to publish a manuscript exposing their life together, the papers were seized and burned by her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, to avoid another terrible scandal. Twenty years later, when Victoria left private instructions for her own burial, she directed that she should be buried with John’s mother’s wedding ring on her finger, and with a lock of his hair and his photograph in her hand. For the next 150 years, John’s family kept a secret archive of Victoria’s letters, jewellery and artefacts about their relationship. They believed that it was too dangerous to expose the truth of their love for one another – until today. Luckily for us, what was scandalous for the Victorians has now been revealed as the greatest love affair of Victoria’s reign. Fern Riddell’s latest book is Victoria’s Secret: The Private Passion of a Queen (Ebury, 2025) Edward VIII puts love before duty The king’s insistence on marrying Wallis Simpson caused a constitutional crisis, writes Alexander Larman The expulsion of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew) from the royal family has undoubtedly been the most scandalous story that ‘the Firm’ has weathered in decades. But it does not even come close to 1936 in constitutional significance. Andrew is, after all, the second son of the late Elizabeth II, whereas Edward VIII was king – albeit a reluctant one. After ascending to the throne following the death of his father, George V, he made it clear that ruling was of secondary importance to his love affair with the married American socialite Wallis Simpson. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-141556826webready-4b8a928-e1770036748150.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson on their wedding day, 3 June 1937. The monarchy’s current woes don’t “even come close” to Edward’s abdication in constitutional significance, writes Alexander Larman (Image by Getty Images)" title="The former Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson on their wedding day, 3 June 1937. The monarchy’s current woes don’t “even come close” to Edward’s abdication in constitutional significance, writes Alexander Larman (Image by Getty Images)" /> It was a sign of the respect in which the monarchy was held at the time that no mention of that relationship was ever made in the British papers, despite it being common knowledge (and freely speculated upon in the European and American media). Had the king been content to keep Wallis as his mistress, the press magnates Lords Beaverbrook and Rothermere would have continued to keep the potentially embarrassing story quiet. Yet Edward would not agree to be crowned king in 1937 unless Wallis could become queen. This was impossible for both religious and social reasons, so he announced his intention of abdicating. Constitutionally, this was more difficult than he had imagined, because of the settlement following the deposition of James II & VII, which ensured that the king ruled by consent of parliament. Only the interventions of the king’s lawyer, Walter Monckton, and prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, allowed Edward to quit the throne, assume the title of Duke of Windsor, and marry Wallis. He left England still well regarded by his subjects, but later revelations about his alleged support for the Nazis irrevocably tarnished this affection. The Duke of Windsor is today regarded as one of Britain’s least popular – if most consequential – monarchs. I suspect that Edward and the abdication will be remembered long after Andrew has become a footnote in royal history. Alexander Larman is a historian, journalist and author of books including The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication (W&N, 2020) The Prince Regent’s marital misery Few royal marriages can have been more hellish than that of Caroline of Brunswick and the wastrel Prince Regent, writes Nigel Jones Thanks to the brilliantly illustrated scandal sheets of Regency Britain, the disastrous marriage of the Prince Regent, later King George IV, to Princess Caroline of Brunswick kept the country entertained and outraged for a quarter of a century. George, a spendthrift wastrel, was hopelessly in debt. Though secretly married to the Roman Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, in 1795 the prince reluctantly took (sight unseen) a legitimate, Protestant bride – his first cousin, Caroline of Brunswick – in the hope that her money would pay off his creditors. It was hate at first sight. George told Lord Malmesbury, who had brought his bride from Germany, “Harris, I am not well: pray get me a glass of brandy.” Equally unimpressed, Caroline found her husband fatter than she’d been led to believe. Meanwhile, Malmesbury noted her poor personal hygiene. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-464476543webready-588f5c4-e1770036889924.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A colourful cartoon showing a couple in the centre, each being dragged in opposite directions by other couples" title="An 1820 cartoon pokes fun at George IV’s attempt to dissolve his marriage to Caroline of Brunswick. The disastrous union “kept the country entertained and outraged for a quarter of a century”, says Nigel Jones (Image by Getty Images)" /> Despite drinking for three days before their wedding, George performed his marital duties: nine months later Caroline gave birth to a daughter, Charlotte. But he made his wife’s life so hellish that she soon went into exile in Europe. She settled in a lakeside villa near Como, met (and joked about having sex with) the pope, and reportedly threw parties at which she danced topless. Read more | The illness and decline of King George III George sent spies to report on her misdeeds, hoping to obtain evidence for a divorce. Caroline’s lovers reputedly included a young Italian and – more scandalously still – Marshal Joachim Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law and ruler of Naples, at a time when Britain was at war with France. When George III died in 1820, Caroline returned to claim her place as queen. But not only did the new king have her tried by the House of Lords for adultery, he had the doors of Westminster Abbey barred when she tried to attend his coronation. The hypocritical adultery accusations having been dropped, Caroline was cheered by the London mob, who saw her as a symbol of opposition to the king. Broken by her humiliation, though, she died three weeks later. Nigel Jones is a historian and writer. His books include Kitty’s Salon (John Blake, 2023) Georgian Britain’s disobedient rake The disreputable Duke of Cumberland caused no end of trouble, writes Felicity Day George III started his reign with noble ambitions: to be a moral leader, faithful to his wife and head of a united royal family. Regrettably, not all of his clan got the memo. George’s younger brother Henry, Duke of Cumberland was notionally a naval officer but in reality a rake-about-town. A dispute with a courtesan had already dragged him into the newspapers before he hit the headlines in 1769 over a more scandalous affair with Lady Grosvenor. The couple were caught by her husband’s servants in a bedchamber in a coaching inn in St Albans, their clothing in disarray. Henry was hauled into court to account for his ‘criminal conversation’ with another man’s wife. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL416311webready-df88fb0-e1770036955185.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a young woman in a gold dress, with a high, grey hairdo" title="In 1771, George III’s younger brother Henry secretly married widow and commoner Anne Horton (shown in a c1777 portrait). Henry’s spirited antics strained the public’s tolerance for the monarchy (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> With revelations ranging from the disguises he donned for secret trysts to the inarticulate and ungrammatical style of his love letters, the duke was made to look ridiculous. A £13,000 bill for damages and costs had to be covered from the Civil List – and, to the king’s further shame, the press was filled with comment about un-princely conduct dragging the nation into disrepute. Then, in 1771, it emerged that Henry had secretly married. His bride was the widow Anne Horton – a commoner, and daughter of a notorious libertine. Furious, the king exiled them from court, and refused to provide financial support. In an attempt to prevent any further such disobedience, he pushed his government into passing the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which made it illegal for royals under the age of 25 to wed without the monarch’s consent. Read more | Charlotte and Diana: the parallel lives of two Princesses of Wales whose deaths sent the nation into mourning It didn’t stop the outcast couple causing trouble. The Cumberlands set up a lively rival court, consorting with opposition politicians and befriending the future George IV and his eldest brothers – who followed their uncle into lives of gambling, womanising and general extravagance, causing countless more PR crises and pushing public support for the royals to the brink. The determined respectability of Victoria’s court was without doubt a direct reaction to their steady drumbeat of scandals. Felicity Day is a journalist and author of The Game of Hearts: True Stories of Regency Romance (Blink Publishing, 2024) Elizabeth II misreads the public mood When the Queen seemed to stay silent in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, she was seen as out of touch, says Shrabani Basu It was meant to be a lazy Sunday at the end of the summer holidays. But on 31 August 1997, Britons woke to the shocking news that Diana, Princess of Wales had died following a car crash in a Paris tunnel. Her friend Dodi Fayed and the car’s driver Henri Paul had also lost their lives. Diana had rarely been away from the headlines. From the Panorama interview in which she famously said that “there were three of us in this marriage”, to the latest round of holiday photos with Dodi Fayed, the end of her fairy-tale wedding to Prince Charles had fuelled tabloid sales for years. Now a pall of gloom descended over Britain. Within hours of the crash, Kensington Palace had turned into a shrine for the late princess. Everyone from Mother Teresa to heads of state was expressing their grief. But though a short statement expressing shock and distress was issued from Buckingham Palace, Diana’s former mother-in-law remained at Balmoral Castle, 500 miles from London, seemingly unmoved. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-73389657webready-1d8b4e5-e1770037044850.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing lots of flowers and written tributes along a spiked metal fence. To the right, a young boy ties something around one of the fence posts" title="A boy attaches a tribute to the railings of Kensington Palace following the death of Princess Diana, 1997. This would “become one of the most trying moments in Elizabeth II’s reign”, writes Shrabani Basu (Image by Getty Images)" /> The Queen was following the rule book – Diana was technically no longer a royal. But the press reflected public sentiment. “Where is our Queen?” screamed The Sun. “Show us you care,” demanded The Express. For once, Elizabeth had not read the national mood. Speculation mounted in the vacuum, with some blaming Charles for his infidelity and for driving Diana into Dodi’s arms. All in all, it would become one of the most trying moments in Elizabeth II’s reign, when the monarchy seemed to have lost the plot. Eventually, an intervention by the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair, convinced the Queen that she needed to be heard. Four days later Elizabeth appeared at the gates of Balmoral and looked at the wreaths. Five days after Diana’s death, she finally made a live broadcast from Buckingham Palace, speaking as a “Queen and as a grandmother”. The people forgave her, and faith in the monarchy was restored. Shrabani Basu is author of Victoria & Abdul: The Extraordinary True Story of the Queen’s Closest Confidant (The History Press, 2010) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the elite unit reinvented itself to confront the challenges of the postwar world
“Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended. David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”. This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?” “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill. One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-106756195webready-3acc480-e1769169656193.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" title="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Men such as Stirling, Paddy Mayne (Stirling’s second-in command) and George Jellicoe (the commanding officer of the SBS) first learned the art of guerrilla warfare with the commandos. Churchill’s son Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, and wrote to his father describing how they were destroying dozens of enemy aircraft in daring raids – accounts that made the PM “terribly proud”. When Churchill visited Cairo in August 1942 to discuss the next phase of the north African campaign with his generals, he found time to lunch with his son and Stirling. Churchill dined with Stirling again at the end of May 1945, following the latter’s release from Colditz, having been captured in January 1943. Stirling had plans to re-deploy the SAS Brigade to the far east, and he wanted to sound out their principal benefactor. But within weeks Churchill was gone, voted out of office by a British public who believed a new leader was required to rebuild the country. The SAS would soon follow the wartime leader into temporary retirement. Read more | The real SAS Rogue Heroes: the true stories behind the WW2 drama Uncertain future Even if Clement Attlee hadn’t been elected prime minister in July 1945, the SAS and Britain’s special forces might still have faced an uncertain future. The country was practically bankrupt, having spent almost £7bn (a quarter of the national wealth) on the war effort. Defence spending would obviously be slashed, and those ‘private armies’ were an obvious place to start. After all, what was the point in maintaining a guerrilla force now that the war was over? The SAS paraded for the final time at their Essex HQ on 8 October 1945. Four days later, Brigadier Michael Calvert, commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, sent a memo to 12 of the most senior officers of the SAS, SBS and Long Range Desert Group entitled ‘Future of SAS Troops’. He explained that the War Office had asked for his “recommendations for the future of SAS in the next war and its composition in the peace-time army” as part of its review into Britain’s military capabilities. Calvert feared that the bureaucrats within the War Office – those “freemasons of mediocrity” – were determined to disband the SAS. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-154417103webready-51d1025-e1769169399236.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" /> One of the most forceful and erudite replies came from Major Roy Farran, DSO and MC, a senior SAS officer who had served in north Africa, Italy and France. He began by stating that, though special forces warfare was still in its infancy, its potential was enormous – particularly because it could exploit the rapid recent developments in air power, communications and motorised transport. “Since it is now so easy to place troops across the enemy lines of communication, I feel that it is important to have a unit of the Special Air Service-type trained to operate individually with the minimum support and with the maximum amount of improvisation,” he wrote. Farran had already identified Britain’s likely next foe and envisaged how special forces could be used in the event of a conflict. “I believe there will be great opportunities for guerrilla troops in the event of a war against the Soviet Union, which I suppose is the only possibility at the moment,” he told Calvert. Such a war would be either a defensive or offensive one. “In the former case a unit like the Special Air Service could inflict damage on the enemy and slow up his advance out of all proportion to its size… In an offensive war the SAS would increase the speed of our advance by spreading panic and confusion in the enemy’s rear.” But the prescient Farran also envisaged that, before a large-scale war with the Soviets, Britain could well find itself entangled in insurgencies as its empire began to break up. Counter-insurgency, he declared, was a role to which the SAS and SBS were ideally suited, adding: “If the principle of the SAS does not continue, I cannot believe that the army is thinking along progressive lines.” Another important figure contacted by the War Office was Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simonds, the commander of MI9’s A Force, who had worked with the SAS in Italy in the autumn of 1943. The main task of MI9 – a secret department within the War Office – was to assist Allied military personnel in enemy territory to evade and escape. Simonds recommended the establishment of three SAS regiments: one for Europe, based in Britain; a second for the Middle East, based in Cyprus; and a third for the far east, based in Singapore. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/standard-3Michael-Calvert-cmykwebready-6c7040b-e1769169955638.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> Simonds wrote that “the role of guerrilla forces in any future war is to defeat the enemy, behind his defended front lines, while the orthodox forces prevent the enemy from advancing”. However, he also suggested that the SAS should “familiarise themselves topographically, militarily, socially and politically with the area. To know and to study the various factions and elements of their area… and to know which personalities should be eliminated should it become necessary in British interest.” That latter role had been the modus operandi of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War – acting more like secret agents than special forces. Read more | “They changed the way war is run”: Ben Macintyre on the early SAS Ultimately, however, the arguments put forward by Calvert and other senior special forces officers fell on deaf ears, and their regiment and units were disbanded. End of an error It didn’t take long before the War Office realised its mistake. In January 1946, Jewish paramilitaries in Mandatory Palestine derailed a British train – the first serious guerrilla act in an insurgency that grew increasingly violent as the fight for the establishment of a Jewish state intensified. It was the first of many such insurgencies as Britain’s empire began to fracture. In 1947, Major Pat Hart, a staff officer in the SAS during the war, learned that the SAS was going to be revived as a territorial regiment under the command of Colonel Brian Franks. Hart was appointed Franks’ second-in-command of 21 SAS – a designation that merged the 1st and 2nd Regiments of wartime fame. According to Hart’s recollection, a War Office study group had been formed in 1946 to re-examine the future of Britain’s special forces. “The result of the study was the recommendation there should be a continuing presence in the army, so the knowledge gained should not be lost, and whilst it could be called anything, probably the best thing was to call it SAS,” he said. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-79043094webready-e676d4c-e1769170186832.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" title="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" /> Recruitment began in September 1947. Of the first 200 soldiers signed up, 59 had served with the SAS during the war. One of those was Pat Duggan. “While the majority in the forces were pleased to return to their former lifestyles [in 1945], many of us, hemmed in by the norms of a peaceful civilisation, felt only frustration and spent our time dreaming of, or searching for, something that resembled our wartime role,” he reflected. “When the SAS was reformed as part of the TA [Territorial Army], we homed in like pigeons – a roll-call of the dispossessed.” Having so many experienced soldiers in their ranks made it easier to train the new recruits in their unorthodox methods. “We were creating an SAS unit that would be available to do any sort of SAS job once it was trained,” explained Hart. “We went off on Nato exercises, as part of the training, and it was very helpful for Nato command to have an SAS unit there.” The first active deployment of 21 SAS was to Malaya (then a British colony, today peninsular Malaysia) to help quell a two-year-long communist insurgency. The uprising – which the British knew as the Malayan Emergency – threatened colonial rubber plantations and tin mines, so the government called on the talents of men skilled in guerrilla fighting. “There were a few contacts,” recalled John Gardner of the SAS. “A few seconds, perhaps minutes, of intense shooting, then silence. Blood trails were followed, and some CT [insurgent] bodies were found and brought in, but many blood trails led to nothing… during these weeks we lived in a general state of alertness, even at night half awake, of dirt and sweat, our blood sucked by the many leeches.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/1.47-CMYKwebready-f500202-e1769170640593.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> The SAS remained in Malaya throughout the 1950s – years that proved a crucial learning curve for a regiment that was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic. Johnny Cooper, one of the original 66 recruits to the SAS when the unit was formed by Stirling in 1941, was a squadron commander in Malaya. “We were carrying out trials to develop a two-week ration that was possible for a man to carry,” he recalled. “The object was to avoid the weekly air drops which were a complete give-away and lost us the vital element of surprise.” As a result, the SAS produced a ‘starvation ration’ consisting of dehydrated rice-based food carried in a four-gallon petrol tin. Read more | He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about A global audience It was no coincidence that in 1952 – shortly after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street – it was decided to raise a regular-army SAS regiment: 22 SAS. Over the following decades, the SAS was sent to fight insurgencies in other remote corners of the British empire and spheres of influence – Aden, Borneo, Oman – before being deployed to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But perhaps the most high-profile of all its operations occurred in the spring of 1980 when it ended the Iranian embassy siege in London in dramatic style, watched by a global television audience. It was a feat that underlined the regiment’s reputation as the world’s pre-eminent special force. Throughout these operations, one aspect of the SAS was immutable, and that was the temperament of each recruit. In 1956, Dare Newell, the SAS regimental headquarters major, wrote to several wartime special forces officers to ask what characteristics they thought essential for an SAS soldier. From their answers he compiled the selection criteria. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1241653502webready-85c1750-e1769170516483.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" /> “A man’s personal qualities and make-up count more than technical efficiency in his own arm of the service. Technical efficiency can be taught; the personal qualities required for long-range, long-term operations in enemy territory, however, are part of a man’s character and, although they may be developed over a period, they must be learnt in childhood.” The qualities deemed essential were initiative, self-discipline, independence of mind, ability to work without supervision, stamina, patience, and a sense of humour. These characteristics continue to underpin the SAS ethos today. Warfare and weaponry evolve, but not human nature. One of the 12 recipients of Mike Calvert’s worried memo in October 1945 was Major John Verney of the SBS. “We came to know one another’s physical and mental capacities, and with them our own,” he said of his wartime service. “Strength and skill were respected, and a fair degree of both were essential, but there were other qualities, such as a cool head, or a good temper, that might well prove more valuable.” CLONE WARS Countries worldwide have established forces based on the British SAS template The reputation of the SAS, encapsulated by its ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto, is global. Its influence is evident in France’s 1er Régiment de Parachutiste d’Infanterie de Marine (1erRPIMa), the US Delta Force and Germany’s GSG 9. New Zealand and Australia have their own SAS regiments, both raised in the 1950s and using the same motto as their British counterpart. It is also alleged that the SAS has trained Ukrainian special forces for many years. The wartime SAS included two regiments of French troops who fought under British command. In June 2024, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, President Emmanuel Macron visited the French SAS memorial in Plumelec in Brittany. According to France’s Ministry of Defence, the 1erRPIMa “has its roots in the SAS of World War II, [and] is based on daring, determination and endurance”; its motto is Qui ose gagne – a direct translation of that of the British SAS. The founder of Delta Force, Charles Beckwith, was one of America’s most innovative military thinkers in the late 1950s. A member of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Beckwith was posted to 22 SAS as part of an exchange in 1962. During that time, he conceived the idea of an American equivalent. On his return to the US, Beckwith received encouragement from General Sam Wilson, a Second World War veteran who had been trained by the British Chindits in south-east Asia. In a 2016 interview, Wilson explained that he had met David Stirling in the course of helping to establish Delta Force. Like Delta Force, Germany’s counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 was formed in the 1970s in response to a series of high-profile terrorist atrocities. When GSG 9 rescued all hostages from a hijacking at Mogadishu airport in Somalia in 1977, it was assisted by two SAS soldiers. Over the course of three decades, David Stirling’s band of “renegade cut-throats” had become a blueprint for special forces units across the globe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/NZ-females-CMYKwebready-cdfea04-e1769170865434.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" title="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" /> This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine