Interwar period

The Republic of Turkey is 100 years old. Built on the ashes of an old empire, what place is there for the Ottoman past in the secular state?

Mystery surrounds George McMahon who, having tried to assassinate Edward VIII, outed himself as an agent of a ‘foreign power’. Does the discovery of new Italian documents solve the puzzle or obscure it further?

After winning the biggest shooting prize in the Empire, Marjorie Foster joined the new pantheon of women making sporting headlines. On the eve of the Second World War, she had a new target in her sights: the War Office.

In the interwar period, France and Germany worked towards an integrated Europe.  

Turkey has a long history of coups, but the failed İzmir plot to assassinate Atatürk in 1926 had a lasting impact. One foreign journalist recorded the reprisals that followed with admiration – which soon turned to fear.

Victor Silvester brought ballroom dancing to the masses and his enormous influence persists to this day in the TV show Strictly Come Dancing. Much less well known is his extraordinary career as a boy soldier in the Great War. Richard Hughes sets the record straight.   

As a minister in the German cabinets of 1921-2, writes David Felix, Rathenau faced formidable problems of post-war reconstruction.

The problems of the interwar mining industry, which led to a General Strike in 1926, writes W.H. Chaloner, epitomized the struggle between capital and labour in twentieth-century Britain.

During the winter of 1935-6, writes Patricia Wright, Italian armies overran Ethiopia and annexed the Empire to the Italian Crown.