Volume 61 Issue 3 March 2011

Roger Moorhouse revisits a perceptive article by John Erickson on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, first published in History Today in 2001, its insights born of a brief period of Russian openness.

Though it is immersed in the theological ideas of the Middle Ages, the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy is sophisticated, sceptical and tolerant, argues James Burge.

As China reclaims its central role in the world, Robert Bickers appeals to Britons and others in the West to take account of the legacy left by the country’s difficult 19th century.

Berlusconi is a product of the country's incomplete unification, argues Alexander Lee.

The Spectator was first published on March 1st, 1711. 

The Mamelukes were massacred in Cairo on March 1st, 1811.

Richard Cavendish marks the anniversary of this great emperor's accession, on March 7th, AD 161.

On a research trip to Moscow in the late 1990s, Deborah Kaple was given a package of papers by a former Gulag official who believed its contents would be of great interest to a western audience.

The death-obsessed and inward-looking Aztec civilisation sowed the seeds of its own destruction, argues Tim Stanley.

Medieval historian Nicholas Orme believes that the teaching of history in Britain’s universities is better now than it has ever been.