Nearly four years of brutal Japanese occupation in WW2 has dimmed Manila’s lustre. The Philippine capital, surrounding an old Spanish fortress, was once a glittering jewel among America’s overseas pos
On 19 February 1927, the city of Shanghai fell silent as a general strike gripped the factories of the industrial district. A magnet for foreign traders and businessmen (British, French, American, the
When the wagons of the Voortrekkers – the Boers, those hardy descendants of the Dutch – moved into the southern African interior in 1836, on the Great Trek, their epic journey to escape British contro
When Mary Tudor, eldest daughter of Henry VIII, succeeded to the throne of England in 1553 it was with wild rejoicing and a degree of popularity rarely seen on the accession of a British monarch. Yet
As with everything else, there were good and bad Roman emperors. The good, like Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–138), Antoninus Pius (138–161) and Marcus Aurelius (161–180) were largely civilized and ci
The Russian Revolution is remembered as the catalyst for the bloody conflict between the Reds and the Whites as each side tried to gain control of the country. But it was far from being so simple. The
Insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere – the majority linked to al Qaeda – are in the news on an almost daily basis. But very little surfaces about a festering insurgency that h
Anthony Tucker-Jones is only too familiar with the modern architects of terror. For the past decade and a half he has worked as the terrorism and security correspondent for the highly respected inters
In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing 4 million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the
It is, of course, no secret that undercover Special Forces and intelligence agencies operated in Northern Ireland and the Republic throughout the ‘troubles’, from 1969 to 2001 and beyond. What is less
Faced with the ‘total onslaught’ by its enemies, in 1979, Apartheid South Africa established Vlakplaas – lit. ‘shallow farm’, a 100-hectare farm nestling in the hills outside Pretoria on the Hennops R
In October 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services described the Irgun Tsvai Leumi – National Military Organization – as ‘an underground, quasi-military organization with headquarters in Palestine …
Sierra Leone’s eleven-year guerrilla war – that left 200,000 people dead – was brief, bloody and mindlessly brutal. It was also the second African war in which mercenaries were hired to counter some o
In the summer of 1934 Adolf Hitler planned and conducted the most ruthless purge of his thirteen-year period as leader of Germany. The victims were not political opponents but friends, colleagues and
In the spring of 73 AD the rock fortress of Masada on the western shore of the Dead Sea was the site of an event that was breathtaking in its courage and self-sacrifice. Here the last of the Jewish Ze
Crammed into cattle trucks and deported to camps, shot and buried in mass graves, or force-marched to death, over 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Turkish state, twenty years before the star
