HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/topic/politics Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:20:11 GMT en hourly 1 In 197 BC, the Romans faced their greatest enemy. You won't believe what they did next https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-197-bc-the-romans-faced-their-greatest-enemy-you-wont-believe-what-they-did-next/ Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:20:11 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-197-bc-the-romans-faced-their-greatest-enemy-you-wont-believe-what-they-did-next/ When an ambitious Seleucid king marched his vast army into Europe to challenge the Roman Republic for control of the Mediterranean world, it looked set to spark a violent clash of the ancient titans. Instead, as Michael Economou reveals, the cunning Romans deployed another potent weapon: diplomacy In the spring of 197 BC, a vast war host rumbled west through the mountains of Asia Minor – the region now known as Anatolia, Turkey. Among its ranks were men assembled from across the known world. Clattering columns of Macedonian pikemen marched alongside auxiliaries from Syria, Palestine, Iran and central Asia, while glittering horsemen in heavy armour rode forward in the shadow of Indian war elephants.

This colossal, multi-ethnic army was united by its charismatic leader, Antiochus III, king of the Seleucid empire and one of the ancient Mediterranean’s most ambitious rulers. The Seleucids, a Macedonian dynasty descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals, already held sway over an enormous realm stretching from the east of what’s now Turkey to the edge of India. The aim of Antiochus’s expedition, according to the Roman historian Livy, was to “drag all of the cities of Asia Minor into the structure of [his] empire”, then push across the Hellespont (Dardanelles) into Europe itself.

These territories, which today comprise western Turkey and eastern Greece, encompassed fertile valleys, vibrant commercial hubs and vital axes of communication between Europe and Asia – a tempting prize for a great conqueror. For the Seleucids, it also had symbolic importance. The founder of the dynasty, Seleucus I Nicator, had conquered much of Asia Minor after Alexander’s death but, over recent decades, the empire had been losing ground to other regional powers. Antiochus’s march west was not simply an imperialist grab for valuable territory but an attempt to reclaim lost Seleucid territory and establish himself as the successor to Alexander the Great.

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Opposing forces

As Antiochus bore down on the Aegean from the east, however, another power was pushing from the west: the Roman Republic. After decades of costly wars – most consequentially with Carthage under the military leadership of Hannibal, who’d invaded Italy via the Alps with his war elephants – by the end of the third century BC, Rome had emerged as the dominant force in the western Mediterranean. In 200 BC, less than a year after its victory in the Second Punic War, Rome’s battle-hardened legions had crossed the Adriatic and clashed with the armies of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s former homeland.

Within three years, Macedon had been defeated and its king, Philip V – once a charismatic, expansionist ruler in the mould of Antiochus III – was reduced to a compliant Roman puppet. The Greek city-states ringing the Aegean basin had mostly been Macedonian client states, and were now liberated from foreign rule and granted independence under Roman protection. As Rome set about enforcing its new order in the region, the stage was set for a titanic clash between the Republic and the approaching Seleucid juggernaut.

Yet the seemingly inevitable military confrontation didn’t transpire – not immediately. For the time being, the conflict was fought not by soldiers and ships but through treaties, embassies and public proclamations aiming to win the allegiance of local powers and sketch out competing territorial claims. This struggle – famously described in the 1950s by historian Ernst Badian as a “cold war” – is not only a fascinating story of ancient superpower rivalry but a revealing case study of the more subtle dimensions of Roman imperialism.

Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean is often portrayed simply as a triumph of an unstoppable war machine. But the legions were often preceded by diplomats and administrators who cultivated alliances, gathered information and disseminated propaganda. It was these methods – which might be termed ‘soft power’ – that Rome used first to challenge Antiochus’s advance and cement its influence in the Aegean.

Imperial expansions

At the turn of the second century BC, the Seleucid empire was the largest power in the eastern Mediterranean. Antiochus III himself had done much to augment the empire’s size and prestige during his 25-year reign. Self-styled as Antiochus the Great, he had spent years dashing across the known world dispatching rivals and seizing new lands. In 200 BC, he struck the Ptolemaic Kingdom, then in the midst of a major uprising, and claimed a sizable chunk of territory encompassing much of the Levant. So, as the Seleucid army marched west in 197 BC, he had good reason to feel confident of another spectacular victory.

At first, Antiochus’s forces advanced virtually unopposed, steamrolling the city-states and petty dynasts of the Anatolian interior as his navy swept across the southern coast and captured vital ports. That summer’s campaign concluded with a final, glorious victory when Antiochus captured the ancient and strategically vital city of Ephesus in south-west Asia Minor. As the army wintered in the city and its hinterland, Antiochus and his generals made plans to strike north in the new year and complete their expedition.

Most coastal settlements in Asia Minor waited anxiously for the Seleucid hammer-blow to fall, and were prepared to surrender without a fight. A few brave cities, however, took the bold decision to resist Seleucid domination – most notably the great commercial centres of Smyrna (now İzmir) and Lampsacus on the Dardanelles. Knowing that they had little prospect of survival on their own, they turned to the other great power of the region for support, dispatching embassies to secure Roman guarantees for their independence.

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Unfortunately for the Smyrnaean and Lampsacene ambassadors, diplomacy in the Mediterranean in the early second century BC was usually improvised and ad hoc, and it was difficult to discern exactly whom they should petition for Roman support. The circuitous journey of the Lampsacene ambassador, Hegesias, has been preserved in a public inscription erected by the citizens of the city to thank him for his efforts. First, Hegesias sailed to mainland Greece and spoke to Rome’s naval commander in the region, who responded with encouraging but vague assurances of support.

He then ventured to Massilia (modern Marseille) – a prosperous Greek colony that was one of Rome’s closest and most loyal allies – where he successfully petitioned the city assembly to help him contact the Senate. Then, with a group of Massiliote advisors in tow, Hegesias travelled to Rome and received an audience with the Senate, which promised to make provisions for Lampsacus in any agreement it reached with Antiochus. On the way home, he made one final stop in Corinth, where he met with the principal Roman official in Greece, Flamininus, and beseeched him to protect Lampsacus’s welfare.

In 196 BC, partly as a result of these panicked embassies, the Roman Senate decided to make a bold declaration. As Antiochus was pressing north and moving to complete his conquest of Asia Minor, the Senate proclaimed that “all of the Greeks in Asia Minor and Europe should be free and self-governing”. The official purpose of this decree was to formally dismantle Macedonian control over the Aegean, and to establish a new status quo in which the autonomy of the Greek city-states was guaranteed by Rome. In reality, however, it was clearly intended as a challenge to Antiochus III, whose expedition aimed to bring these cities under Seleucid control. This is made clear by the text of the decree, which explicitly mentions several cities that had already been taken by Antiochus the previous year.

A roar of cheers

Rome reaffirmed this declaration later that year at the Isthmian games, an important Panhellenic festival held near the city of Corinth. The Greek historian Polybius described how, with “the most distinguished men from almost the whole world” in attendance, Flamininus announced that Rome would withdraw its armies from Greece, leaving the cities “without garrisons and subject to no tribute”. At this, the crowd erupted in ecstasy, letting out “such a mighty roar of cheers… that those who listen to the story now could hardly imagine it” and almost killing Flamininus as they showered him with crowns and ceremonial diadems. For the Greeks, the Roman proclamation felt like the end of a nightmare that had begun when Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II of Macedon, had subjugated them almost 150 years ago.

For the Romans, the declaration – and the theatrical way it was presented to the Greeks by Flamininus – was a masterstroke that established them as the protectors of Greece and cast Antiochus as an oppressive tyrant who threatened to extinguish the cities’ newfound freedom. It had also immediately created a network of grateful allies in Greece whose infrastructure, manpower and support were more strategically useful (and cheaper) than a permanent Roman garrison.

European ambitions

Yet even as Rome’s propaganda war began to bear fruit, Antiochus was pressing on with his campaign, seeking to create facts on the ground that would be difficult for Rome to challenge through diplomatic manoeuvring. Striking north from Ephesus, he crossed the Dardanelles and marched into Europe. His first act was to restore the Thracian city of Lysimachia, which had recently been destroyed by Rome’s allies during the war against Macedon, and establish it as his primary base in the region. Rebuilding Lysimachia was a clear declaration to Rome that Antiochus intended to remain in Europe and would not meekly accept the diktats of the Roman Senate.

Rome then sent an embassy to Lysimachia to treat directly with Antiochus in a semi-public diplomatic exchange. The Roman case was simple: Antiochus should withdraw from the cities he had taken – which had been open to conquest only because Rome had defeated Philip V – and stop threatening Roman security by pushing into Europe.

According to Polybius, Antiochus contended that the territory had been rightful Seleucid soil since Seleucus I conquered it decades earlier. As such, Antiochus was not “taking them [the Greek cities] by exploiting Philip’s difficulties, but retaking them in accordance with his rights”. Antiochus also refused to engage the Romans in a performative contest over who was the true ‘liberator’ of Greece. Though in theory he did not object to autonomy for the cities of Asia Minor, he argued that it was his gift to bestow, not the Romans’. As such, he deftly recast ‘freedom’ not as an absolute right granted by the Romans but a privilege that only he could afford to the cities under his control.

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Antiochus’s intransigence left Rome in a diplomatic and strategic bind. To declare war would be both a naked act of aggression and an unwelcome new drain on the Republic’s resources. On the other hand, if Rome did not declare war, it would have little choice but to honour its promise and withdraw its forces from the Aegean, leaving it open to further Seleucid attacks.

In the short term, Rome resolved this dilemma by declaring war on Sparta. The city’s new king, Nabis, had been aggressively reasserting Sparta’s position in southern Greece, and Rome’s allies in the region had been asking Flamininus to intervene for some time. The war provided a convenient pretext for Rome to keep its army in the region for another season of campaigning without breaking the commitments it had made at the Isthmian games. However, it did not resolve the deeper strategic problems posed by Antiochus.

Hannibal bites back

In 195 BC, an explosive new factor disrupted the delicate diplomatic balance. Exiled from his native Carthage, Rome’s most feared enemy, Hannibal, had made the long journey across the Mediterranean to the court of Antiochus III, where he offered his services. Though Antiochus received Hannibal with little more than respectful courtesy and gave him no major land commands, the news provoked horror among the Roman people, who feared that Hannibal was poised to harry Italy again with a Seleucid army at his back. Over the following two years, the Romans made military plans to defend Sicily and Italy from a potential invasion (though in hindsight such a scenario was highly unlikely).

While some feared that the return of Hannibal would coerce Rome into maintaining its garrison in Greece, the Senate decided to fulfil its promise and withdraw the legions. That said, Rome continued to make its presence felt in the Aegean by establishing itself as a local mediator and guarantor of civic autonomy.

These interventions did not respect the boundaries of Antiochus’s empire. For instance, a 194/193 BC inscription from the city of Teos on the Ionian coast, then firmly under Antiochus’s control, notes that the Romans officially granted the city exemption from tribute during this period. The Romans euphemistically described these activities as “making friendships”, but Antiochus understood them as a grave threat: they compromised the monopoly on generosity that underpinned Seleucid royal ideology.

That winter, Antiochus sent envoys to Rome in a last-ditch attempt to reach an accord. The discussions followed the same pattern as before, with the Romans (led by Flamininus) insisting that Antiochus evacuate Europe and confine himself to Asia, and Antiochus claiming that Thrace was historic Seleucid territory that he could not abandon. Flamininus, ever the showman, then took the discussion public, delivering a speech affirming that Rome would use force to keep Antiochus out of Europe if he refused their demands.

By this stage, it was becoming clear that only outright war could break the deadlock. On the way back to Antiochus’s court, the nonplussed Seleucid ambassadors paid a visit to the Aetolian League, an alliance of Greek cities that had been Rome’s allies in the war against Philip V but which had been disappointed by the terms of the subsequent peace settlement. Encouraged by the prospect of Seleucid support, the Aetolians put out diplomatic feelers to neighbours in an effort to build an anti-Roman coalition of Greek states. When this proved mostly unsuccessful, the Aetolians began attacking surrounding cities, bringing them into direct conflict with the nearby Achaean League, loyal allies of Rome.

The Aetolians lost on most fronts but were able to seize Demetrias, a strategically vital fortress-city in Thessaly, and invited Antiochus to occupy it as his new base in Europe. Recognising that war was now inevitable, Antiochus decided that he could not waste the opportunity, and dispatched his army to Demetrias. For Rome, this further incursion into Europe was impossible to ignore, and legions began swarming back across the Adriatic to meet Antiochus. The ‘cold war’ was over, and the real struggle for the Aegean had begun.

Rome and its coalition of allies outnumbered even Antiochus’s enormous war host, an imbalance that only worsened when Philip V of Macedon entered the war against him. Hoping to negate this disadvantage, in 191 BC Antiochus chose to meet the Romans at Thermopylae, the narrow, highly defensible pass where Leonidas I of Sparta had made his heroic stand against the Persian empire almost 300 years earlier. After resisting several waves of Roman attacks, the Seleucid force was ambushed by a flanking manoeuvre through the surrounding heights. Antiochus’s army disintegrated and he was forced to scurry across the Aegean back to Asia Minor and regather his forces. The Roman legions pursued and ultimately defeated him in a decisive battle near the city of Magnesia.

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Antiochus was compelled to sign a humiliating peace agreement, the Treaty of Apamea, which stripped his empire of its territories west of the Taurus Mountains and parcelled them out to Roman allies. Even more ruinously, the treaty forced the empire to pay a crippling annual indemnity to Rome amounting to perhaps 10 per cent of the Seleucids’ revenues. The resulting financial crisis drove the Seleucids to squeeze new revenues from their beleaguered subjects, prompting waves of rebellions and political instability.

Antiochus himself was killed by an angry mob while looting the temples of Elam in south-west Iran – an astonishingly grubby end. A few decades later, Seleucid attempts to extract money from the city of Jerusalem and its rich temple prompted the uprising known as the Maccabean Revolt – the context for the story of Hanukkah, still commemorated by Jews today.

As the Seleucid empire entered into a death spiral and disintegrated over the following decades, Rome continued to push east. The Republic used the same diplomatic toolkit it had deployed against Antiochus as it spread its influence: guaranteeing the autonomy of its allies, establishing itself as the arbiter of local disputes, and threatening potential rivals with overwhelming punishment. It was by these methods, as much as through military force, that Rome finally established itself as sole master of the Mediterranean world.

Michael Economou is a historian and author

This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> "No votes, no golf!": how the suffragettes made sport a political battlefield https://www.historyextra.com/membership/no-votes-no-golf-how-the-suffragettes-made-sport-a-political-battlefield/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:30:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/no-votes-no-golf-how-the-suffragettes-made-sport-a-political-battlefield/ In the early 20th century, sport came to be regarded as a male-only activity – by men, anyway. As Rachel Hewitt explains, the overlooked history of women’s participation in cricket, golf, wrestling, hockey and even mountaineering is intertwined with the emergence of the suffragist movement On the afternoon of Saturday 1 November 1902, a group of men and women careered around Hampton Court Park, enjoying a friendly game of hockey. A local newspaper reported that “the weather was glorious”, though the ground was muddy. Players included residents of Hampton Court Palace’s apartments; it is likely that Princess Sophia Duleep Singh – a talented hockey player who turned out for both the Palace team and the nearby East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club, and who lived on the Hampton Court estate – was among them.

Photographs of the Molesey club help us imagine Singh in action: they show women sprinting in determined pursuit of the ball, loosened neckties flying free from billowing white shirts, rose-red skirts ballooning to reveal shin pads and studded boots, sticks expertly poised to strike winning shots.

Daughter of the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, Sophia Duleep Singh was born in England and is known today for her leading role in the British suffrage movement. As Anita Anand recounts in her 2015 biography Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Singh boycotted the 1911 census and refused to pay taxes or fees for dog and carriage licences because she would not accept “taxation without representation”.

She joined suffrage protests and raised funds for the Kingston and district branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), selling The Suffragette newspaper outside her Hampton Court home. (Strictly speaking, suffragettes took direct, often militant, action, whereas suffragists used largely peaceful methods in pursuit of votes for women. However, the two groups were often conflated in the 20th century.)

Political football

Though her activities in support of votes for women are widely recognised, Singh’s sporting activities are mostly forgotten today. Indeed, we don’t tend to speak of suffragists and sportswomen in the same breath. That’s partly because of the enduring legacy of anti-suffrage propaganda, which depicted WSPU members as scrawny spinsters or portly old maids – tyrants in the home, not athletes on the hockey pitch.

It also reflects a popular and persistent misconception that sport – particularly women’s sport – is a trivial leisure pursuit and irrelevant to politics. If such beliefs are still widespread today, why would we imagine that anyone was interested in suffragists’ sports a century ago?

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Yet these entwined ideas – that suffragists didn’t care much about sport, and that politics and sports shouldn’t mix – obscure an important historical thread. Sport was genuinely meaningful to many suffragist women, both personally and politically. When Singh declared that sport was “the birth right of every happy, healthy girl, be she princess or peasant”, she was making a political point – echoing the republican theory that English men and women had once possessed liberties that were subsequently removed by tyrannical oppressors.

Singh was far from an outlier in her love of sport. For example, the Pankhursts were members of the Clarion Cycling Club. Rosa May Billinghurst, who survived polio, used an adapted tricycle to attend suffragist protests. Hilda Webb, who threw stones at government buildings with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, helped to establish women’s hockey in Ireland.

Vera Holme, chauffeur to various leaders of the WSPU, excelled at fly fishing. There was also Lady Florence Dixie, an early suffragist and president of the British Ladies’ Football Club – co-founded with London suffragist Nettie Honeyball – as well as a passionate hunter, mountaineer and explorer. Louisa Lumsden, president of the Aberdeen branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a champion of girls’ international cricket. Across the Atlantic, Lucy Diggs Slowe advocated for the inclusion of black women in the US suffrage movement. She won the American Tennis Association tournament (which had been founded for black tennis players) in 1917, the year after the US Lawn Tennis Association had banned black athletes.

Indeed, in the early 20th century the association between suffragism and sport was so entrenched that it became a literary trope. One suffragette character in the French play Les Éclaireuses was “dressed in a short tweed hockey skirt”. Another was a “lady mountaineer” who featured in Frank Savile’s 1908 short story The Suffragette. Spare a thought, too, for the male narrator of a poem who, wearied by his girlfriend’s devotion to sport and politics, lamented that “A golfing girl is bad enough, but oh! A Suffragette!”

Mixed messages

Many of the sportiest suffragists of the early 20th century had honed their athletic abilities – along with their commitment to women’s rights – in the 1880s and 1890s. During those decades, men and women competed together in mixed-doubles tennis and in mixed-sex cricket and hockey games. Hiking, climbing, sailing, skating, rowing and running in hare-and-hounds cross-country events were shared pastimes. Men and women even bobsleighed together. They often used the same sporting facilities, belonged to the same clubs, and revelled in the reporting of their sporting achievements in the same newspapers and newsletters.

Sometimes, though, men’s physiological and social advantages made it desirable for women to play sport in all-female environments. The mountaineer Lizzie Le Blond suggested that a Ladies’ Alpine Club could counter the male-dominated nature of mountaineering literature by forming an “extensive and authoritative library” of women’s writings on the subject. She also wanted women to share female-specific information about “the formation of climbing parties, the provision of guides, means of travelling, and general accommodation”.

In addition, a wealth of women’s sports clubs and competitions sprang up in the 1880s and 1890s, including the East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club (which became England’s first ever women’s hockey team in 1887), the Irish Ladies’ Hockey Union in 1894 and, in 1895, the Blackheath Ladies’ Hockey Club and the All England Women’s Hockey Association.

Most surviving records concern upper-class pursuits, but sport was equally important in urban and rural working-class women’s lives. The 1880s saw the tail end of a craze for female pedestrianism, with women and girls earning money speed-walking extraordinary distances. In 1864, for example, Emma Sharp is said to have been the first woman to complete a 1,000-mile walk in 1,000 hours.

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Researcher Sarah Elizabeth Cox has unearthed evidence of two black or mixed-heritage women known as “the Sisters Mills, or the Muscular Maids from Mexico”, who boxed in the East End of London in the 1880s.

Women’s foot-races and cricket games were staples of village fairs from the 17th century onwards – it’s said that overarm bowling was devised by women as a way to avoid getting their hands caught in skirts. Later, when women’s teams such as the Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club were formed – many of them initially drawing players from women working in factories during the First World War – they were building on a long heritage of working-class women’s sport.

Exercising ambition

As the new century began, women who had been physically active had experienced how sport promoted health, strength, education and camaraderie, as well as offering opportunities for travel, adventure and meeting new people. They knew that participating could bring money, fame and respect – and the chance to lead. Lizzie Le Blond referred to climbing as “the work”. Fellow climber Frederica Plunket described how physical activity allowed her to escape a lifestyle of upper-class feminine indolence featuring neither “hard work” nor “play”, letting her instead tire herself out and earn “absolute rest” – as men did.

Women’s sporting experiences informed their political and social ambitions, too. The late 19th-century ideal ‘New Woman’ was well educated, wanted to work and was intent upon domestic equality. She was also an enthusiast for sport, particularly cycling. Reasons for this were outlined by the American suffragist Susan B Anthony in 1895: “Bicycling… has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel… the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”

This passion for sport fed into the later female suffrage movement, often in practical ways. During the 1908 trial of the Pankhursts and Flora Drummond for inciting a riot, suffragist Evelyn Sharp described how she’d been able to dodge a policeman: “It was like a rush at hockey.” Meanwhile, Suffragists used bicycles to distribute campaign literature.

Between 1912 and 1914, though, suffragists’ approach to sport took a markedly different turn. These were years when militant suffragettes launched a campaign in which sports facilities were the primary target. At first, women approached male politicians as they played golf. They heckled Asquith at the Aboyne course and, on the Balmoral links, threw a worm at Winston Churchill.

The campaign intensified in 1913. Over just one weekend that February, at least 12 golf courses were damaged. Suffragettes used acid and weedkiller to burn phrases into the grass, including “Justice Before Sport” and “No Votes, No Golf”. They dug holes into greens, inserting suffragist magazines and posters. And they replaced the golf courses’ flags with their own, bearing mottos such as “Women’s War”.

Later the same month, a groundsman at Roehampton Golf Club interrupted two suspicious-looking women who ran off, dropping a bag whose incendiary contents suggested that they had intended to burn down the pavilion. The police raided the flat of a suffragette called Olive Hockin, where they found corrosive fluid, clippers, firelighters, hammers, flints, false car registration plates and golfing flags.

At a WSPU meeting soon afterwards, a perplexed attendee asked: “Why do the Suffragettes destroy golf links?” It was a reasonable question. After all, many suffragists had grown up loving sport. Why were they now seeking to destroy the facilities on which they’d originally flourished?

Eva McLaren – Aiming high

An activist and leading member of five suffrage societies, McLaren (1852–1921) was a keen mountaineer in her youth. Mountaineering was so synonymous with suffragism that, in 1909, Votes for Women joked that the Ladies’ Alpine Club’s membership roster could be a recruitment list for militant suffragettes. McLaren created a centre of excellence for women’s sport, with a focus on hockey.

Edith Garrud – Creating fighting chances

Trained as a physical culture instructor, Garrud (1872–1971) specialised in teaching Japanese martial arts to women and girls from the late 1890s, becoming the first known female jiu-jitsu instructor in Britain. She joined the Women’s Freedom League in 1906, offering jiu-jitsu classes to suffragettes as “a necessary safeguard for the woman who has to defend herself” against the police. She trained the 30-strong all-female Bodyguard Unit, who protected the WSPU’s leaders from arrest.

Olive Hockin – The skiing suffragette

Joining the suffrage movement in 1912, Hockin (1881–1936) took part in militant action including attempted arson at Roehampton Golf Club. According to biographies, she was a trained artist who designed suffragette banners. Less well known is that Hockin was also a champion ski-runner and ski-jumper. She went to prison for the Roehampton action, but got out in time to win the British Ski Championship in January 1914.

Male privilege

In November 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst explained that men had “made a rule that, although the ladies may play golf all the week [on days when men were typically at work], the golf links are entirely reserved for men on Saturday and Sunday”.

This was about more than day-to-day sexism. Pankhurst was identifying a dramatic cultural shift in which sport was being redefined as a predominantly male pursuit. The modern Olympic Games, which were first held in 1896 and initially permitted no female participants, marked a milestone in this shift. The Olympics’ co-founder, academic and historian Pierre de Coubertin, had decided that masculinity was under threat. He thought that “solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism” was the best way to rebuild weak men – and would entail cleansing sport of female influence. This reinforced a belief extolled in all-male schools and universities, which saw organised sport as key to preparing men for careers in public service.

Sports clubs and competitions around the world followed the Olympics’ example. Cycling clubs changed policies to exclude women; new groups such as the Manchester Wheelers were male-only. Wimbledon had no official women’s doubles championships until 1913. And in 1907, the Swiss Alpine Club – which had welcomed female members since 1863 – kicked out women.

Golf had once been a quintessential upper-class female sport, but clubs started imposing restrictions of the type Pankhurst mentioned in her speech, or banning women altogether. Women’s sport was shorthand for women’s political emancipation, and there was a burgeoning backlash against both. In an 1897 protest against women taking degrees at the University of Cambridge, male students directed their ire towards an effigy of a female cyclist.

By 1910, sport had been redefined to be predominantly associated with men. Suffragettes justified their “ruin of golf links and cricket pavilions” on the basis that it was the best way to attract men’s attention while “injuring no human being”. Flora Drummond observed that “[Male golfers] don’t give a thought to the women who are being tortured in prison by the government… [but] it interests golfers to find their links damaged and they inquire who did it. Then they realise that women are asking for votes.” Emmeline Pankhurst urged angry male golfers to “tell the government to give women the vote in order to secure the golf greens from further injury”.

A man’s world?

In short, sport was not tangential to suffragist politics: it was the training ground on which many women first realised their capabilities and their deserved rights. Following male logic, which emphasised how sporting excellence helped prepare men for professional roles, it was also the arena in which women had, time and time again, proved themselves well equipped for public life. The suffragettes’ golf course campaign saw women reclaiming sporting spaces in which they had once been at home, reminding the public of this not-too-distant history.

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Their protests also drew attention to the dramatic change that was taking place in sporting culture, out of which women were being driven. Among other things, this demonstrated how men’s support for women’s rights was inconsistent, and could go into reverse. As Sophia Duleep Singh argued, sport was a “birthright”for women – an original liberty that was being denied and removed by a tyrannical oppressor. Addressing men directly, Emmeline Pankhurst pointed out that “for nearly 50 years we had your sympathy and your support, and nothing happened… [now, by targeting your sports facilities, we] have your disgust and have you thoroughly annoyed.”

In the campaign for suffrage, women’s rights eventually prevailed – but the backlash against women’s sport had long-lasting effects. It succeeded not only in suppressing women’s ability to play sport but also in obscuring records of women’s sporting achievements. It entrenched the ideas that, as de Coubertin put it, female sport is “against the laws of nature” and that sport had always been – or certainly should have been – the preserve of men.

Because of that backlash, the history of suffragettes’ sporting pursuits has been forgotten. By resurrecting this history, we can gain not just a better understanding of the suffragist movement but also a more comprehensive understanding of sport’s identity and its kinship with politics.

Rachel Hewitt is a writer and historian. Her books include In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (Chatto, 2023)

This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> These are history's greatest unsung heroes. How many have you heard of? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-historys-greatest-unsung-heroes-how-many-have-you-heard-of/ Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:00:22 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-historys-greatest-unsung-heroes-how-many-have-you-heard-of/ Our team of historians, broadcasters and authors champion those whose contributions have been overlooked Nordic women...

…or, more explicitly, all the women denied their place in history

Excuse the shouty capitals for a moment, but my answer is MOST WOMEN. Take, for example, the women of the early Nordic world, who spent so much of their lives making the cloth for the sails and clothing that would power the whole of the Viking Age. After all, if you’re trying to settle the islands of the North Atlantic and even reach the edge of North America, you can’t sail across an ocean without a sail. Or without tough waterproof clothing. Or, in fact, without any clothing at all.

Nor could your society have survived without the food that the women cooked, preserved and stored, the farmsteads they ran, the children they birthed and/or cared for, and so on.

But did the deeds and talents of these women make it into Old Norse poetry? Not unless they were being praised for their beauty. Are there any sagas named for their female protagonists? Not really: it’s the Saga of Erik the Red (even though he falls off a horse and drops out of the narrative after the first few chapters), not the Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveller. Did the names of all of those influential Norse women echo down the ages, immortalised in chronicles and annals? I think we all know the answer to that.

Eleanor Barraclough, historian and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The Georgian socialite who transformed Britain’s fight against smallpox

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is best known – if she is known at all – as a writer and socialite. She graced the most fashionable drawing rooms and assemblies that Georgian society had to offer. By the age of 16, she had taught herself Latin and written two volumes of poetry and a short novel. In 1712, she married Edward Wortley Montagu who became British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, and wrote extensively of her experiences as a woman in Constantinople (now Istanbul).

Her views were shockingly unconventional and way ahead of her time: “Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians,” she wrote in one letter. “’Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have.” She became a leading light of the so-called ‘Bluestockings’ who, often hailed as England’s earliest feminists, hosted salons to promote literature, conversation and female education.

But Lady Mary’s achievements went further still. Smallpox was one of the greatest scourges of the age, and had afflicted her own family. During her time in the Ottoman empire she encountered variolation – inoculation using material from a smallpox sufferer – and asked the British Embassy’s surgeon to inoculate her young son.

After returning home, in 1721 she had her daughter inoculated, too, and campaigned tirelessly to encourage others to do the same. Her efforts were met with bitter hostility, even physical violence, and dismissed as the fad of ignorant women. Undaunted, Lady Mary continued to pioneer inoculation, thereby saving countless lives across Britain and western Europe well before Edward Jenner introduced his more famous vaccination.

Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster

• Read more | "An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain

Pliny the Elder

The Roman encyclopaedist whose pursuit of knowledge ended in heroic sacrifice

Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, is best known for his extraordinary dedication to the encyclopaedia known as the Natural History, composed of 37 books. Completing the work around AD 77, Pliny documented a vast range of topics, from plants and zoology to art and geography. Though his investigations are at times astoundingly accurate, his descriptions sometimes veer into wildly speculative ground, giving us a fascinating insight into the ancient Romans’ understanding of the natural world.

Yet this was not Pliny’s only achievement. He was also the praefectus classis (admiral) of the Roman navy stationed at Misenum on the Bay of Naples. In AD 79, on the day Vesuvius erupted, Pliny was at his villa across the bay. At first, he seems to have treated the phenomenon with curiosity rather than alarm. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with him watching the events unfold, later records that he exercised, dined and bathed before receiving word that those nearer the volcano were in urgent need of help.

Pliny immediately ordered his fleet to set sail, both to assist those in danger and, characteristically, to observe the eruption at closer range, perhaps intending to record it.

He never returned. Most likely overcome by respiratory distress, he was found two days later on the shore, his body lying as though at rest. In more ways than one, Pliny gave himself not only to those he sought to rescue, but to those who came after him, preserving knowledge that has endured for nearly 2,000 years.

Jess Venner, ancient historian and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii (Mudlark, 2026)

Megasthenes

The Greek ambassador who helped connect the ancient world

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s reign, his vast empire split into several parts, each ruled by one of his generals, who in turn made themselves head of a ruling dynasty. The Seleucid empire, established by the general Seleucus, governed a large part of what had been the Persian empire. And in the last years of the fourth century BC, Seleucus sent a formal ambassador from his court to the court of King Chandragupta Maurya, in Pataliputra (modern Patna), India.

The ambassador’s name was Megasthenes, a man rarely credited with establishing a permanent link between the Hellenistic world and the world of the Mauryan empire. And for me, he is the unsung hero from history. Megasthenes wrote a whole book, Indica, about his experiences of the Mauryan empire, the incredible nature of the king’s capital at Pataliputra, the wondrous geography of the Indian landscape, and of the comparative workings of Indian society and the king’s court. Indica also articulated a number of ways in which the worlds of Greece and India could have been connected in the mythical past, positioning an opportunity for dialogue and collaboration between the two.

His was the first word in the connections between cultures that would become essential to the functioning of the wider world, as routes for trade, people and ideas began to open up, not just between the Greek world and India, but also between India and central Asia and central Asia and ancient China, which would eventually become the Silk Roads. As such, Megasthenes became a first-hand witness to a new world of connection.

Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick

• Read more | Alexander the Great died aged just 32 – but where had he been planning to conquer next?

Antoine Simon

The enslaved man who crossed the Pyrenees in search of freedom

In 1446, a black man enslaved in Barcelona made an extraordinary escape across the Pyrenees: his name was Antoine Simon. Somehow he had heard that Pamiers, in the south-west of France, outlawed slavery and that he might live as a free man there. The punishment for escaped slaves was utterly brutal yet he took the courageous step of running away.

There is so much we don’t know: how did he navigate this dangerous terrain? What did he eat? How did he find shelter? One possibility is that he’d gathered information from merchants who came into contact with his enslaver’s household. Another is that freed black slaves offered advice to those who were not yet free. Historian Debra Blumenthal has uncovered evidence of a black confraternity in late medieval Valencia, which offered this kind of support.

When, against all the odds, Simon reached Pamiers his travails were not over. His former enslaver pursued him and took out a case against him – for theft of himself. This was heard in the court of Pamiers and it was gruelling. Simon was supported by a local notable called Pierre Toc, who had employed him on his arrival in Pamiers; the local count supported Simon’s former owner. The municipality, however, was clear: slavery had no place in the civilised society of Pamiers.

The more I delve into this story, the more I am struck by Antoine Simon’s extraordinary determination and courage, and by how that courage was sustained by the support he received.

Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford

Sir Hugh Dowding

The uncharismatic genius who built Britain’s winning air-defence system

“The bomber will always get through.” This was Stanley Baldwin’s famous summary of what the future of air war looked like in the 1930s. But the head of RAF Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, refused to give in to such pessimism. It is largely down to this remarkable man that British air defences did not completely collapse during the Battle of Britain.

At first sight, Dowding was a stereotypical middle-class Scot: dour, stubborn, with a moustachioed stiff upper lip. His contemporaries made fun of his puritanical nature: his nickname was ‘Stuffy’. But when it came to air defence he was a true revolutionary.

In the late 1930s, it was Dowding who pushed through the development of the Spitfire, and who championed the rapid construction of radar stations all across southern and eastern England. He then created a whole system of aerial defence which rapidly channelled information about incoming German bombers through to fighter pilots via a network of central control rooms. His incredibly efficient system undoubtedly saved Britain in the darkest days of 1940.

Dowding’s fatal flaw was his lack of personal charisma. His rivals in the RAF included the fighter ace Douglas Bader and Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the hugely ambitious commander of 12 Fighter Group. These men criticised him incessantly and wanted to try an alternative system of defence – the ‘Big Wing’ strategy (which actually turned out to be far less efficient than Dowding’s system).

When the Germans switched to bombing by night, and Dowding struggled to answer this new threat, they finally succeeded in ousting ‘Stuffy’ from both his post and the public imagination. It was a painful lesson in the art of leadership: sometimes charm is more important than being brilliant at your job.

Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017)

• Read more | Did the Spitfire really save Britain in WW2?

Isabelle Émilie de Tessier

The pioneering female cartoonist whose contribution was erased

I suspect that most readers won’t recognise the face of the cartoon character who appears on this page, but his bulbous nose, gangly frame and battered top hat were beloved by millions of Victorians. His name was Ally Sloper, and he is widely regarded as the first superstar of British comics. His misadventures were chronicled in one of the country’s bestselling papers, legions of loyal readers joined his fan club, and his face appeared on merchandise from doorstops to tobacco pipes.

However, Ally himself isn’t my choice for the great unsung hero of history. Instead, I want to champion the artist who made him such a success. Sloper was technically invented by Charles Ross, editor of the satirical magazine Judy, a rival to the better-known Punch. But Ross was a clumsy artist, and the true creative force behind Ally Sloper was his wife. Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, who worked under the penname Marie Duval, was an actress-turned-artist. Her work had a loose, surrealist and occasionally grotesque quality that perfectly suited the slapstick adventures of Sloper and his pals. By the mid-1870s, Duval was contributing more than a hundred new cartoons to Judy each year. It was her humour and talent that made Sloper such a star.

Ross was quick to credit his wife but, in the decades after their deaths, her contribution was gradually erased. Accounts of Sloper’s origins relegated her to a mere ‘assistant’ or ‘helper’, and her true contribution only came to light fairly recently. It’s a familiar story. Duval stands for all the brilliant Victorian women whose pioneering work was credited to their husbands.

Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University

Ida B Wells

The activist who challenged segregation and fought lynching

Some people have heard of journalist and NAACP co-founder Ida B Wells, but her badassery still outmatches her level of fame. Born enslaved in 1862, Wells started battling injustice in the US while still only a young woman. In 1884, she successfully sued a railway company after a conductor dragged her from the train for refusing to trade her ticketed seat for the Jim Crow car.

That was not the only time she bodily defied segregation: in the 1913 national women’s suffrage parade, Wells rejected orders for black women to walk at the back. Instead, she waited in the crowd until she could slip into the parade and join the white women of her state’s delegation.

The fight against lynching was the defining endeavour of Wells’s life. Defenders of the gruesome practice claimed that it was merely a response to black crime. Wells knew better – especially after a number of black men in Tennessee were killed by white storeowners. She combated misinformation with data, revealing through statistics that lynchings arose most often from economic rivalries and political terror. She published horrifying accounts in exposés such as A Red Record and launched an international campaign, lecturing in Great Britain about American ‘barbarism’ and spurring the founding of the London Anti-Lynching Committee.

For decades, Wells waged war with facts and pen, even as she founded numerous organisations for women’s and civil rights. A “sword among lions”, as historian Paula Giddings dubbed her, Wells spent her life causing what later activists would call “good trouble”.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University

This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> "The Iraq War was a disaster": a historian's view on the modern Middle East https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-iraq-war-was-a-disaster-a-historians-view-on-the-modern-middle-east/ Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:00:09 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-iraq-war-was-a-disaster-a-historians-view-on-the-modern-middle-east/ We have, says Simon Sebag Montefiore, long needed a history of the modern Middle East encompassing all the myriad peoples, forces and states that have shaped the region. That’s why, he tells Charlotte Vosper, he decided to brave the heat of The Cauldron Charlotte Vosper: You begin your new book with Abdulaziz’s raid on Riyadh in 1902, a major event in the foundation of Saudi Arabia. Why?

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Virtually all histories of the Arab world start with the traditional Levant – Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria – or Constantinople; anywhere but Saudi Arabia. Yet Saudi is really the centre of the Middle East. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina are in Saudi Arabia, so the Gulf has become the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds. I began my book with Riyadh to signal that this is very much an Arab-centric history of the modern Middle East. Plus I think that Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s raid is one of the best stories – like something out of Lawrence of Arabia.

What powers were at play there at the turn of the 20th century?

In 1900, the Middle East was really another world – and that’s the central point of this book: to get across just how recently the Middle East, as we know it today, was created.

At the turn of the century, half of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The other half was ruled by the British – the Trucial States (essentially, what’s now the United Arab Emirates), plus places such as Aden, along with Egypt. France ruled Algeria and Tunisia. There were virtually no independent Arab states except central Arabia.

What happened in the Middle East when those imperial powers fought the First World War?

First of all, most people forget that a large part of the First World War was fought in the Middle East. Britain suffered some major disasters in the region – defeat at the Dardanelles, surrender at Kut in Iraq – and it’s often forgotten how resilient the Ottoman empire really was.

More importantly, the war was also a major turning point for the Middle East. With the western front in a desperate state, Britain promised swathes of Ottoman territory to other powers and groups including France, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Jews, the Italians, the Armenians, the Kurds and, above all, Russia. So there were many competing claims to Middle Eastern territory.

One of these promises was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the early 20th century, the ancient Jewish desire to return to the Holy Land and the longstanding connection to Jerusalem had inspired a political movement, and Jews – like other nations – sought to create a homeland with a shared religion and language in Palestine. Jewish leaders successfully persuaded the British, French and Americans that one of the entities to be carved from the Ottoman empire should encompass this Jewish ‘national home’. Zionists envisaged this as a land of socialist farming communities under British rule or an Arab monarchy, or a single state shared with the Palestinian Arabs.

In the event, the British and the French divvied up the whole Middle East between them. It was decided that the British would get Iraq and Palestine, and the French took Greater Syria (Lebanon and Syria). Constantinople would be ruled by the Allies, while the Greeks and Italians got half of today’s Turkey, with Kurdish and Armenian states in the east. The British and French provinces were called ‘mandates’: Middle Eastern states that would be under British or French control while the peoples prepared for full statehood. As we can see today in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Yemen, Libya and Sudan, the nation-state structure isn’t necessarily suited to the incredibly complex, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian patchwork that is the Middle East.

• Read more | “The early 2000s was a strange era of fear and terror”: remembering the Iraq War 20 years on

How did Middle Eastern people respond to the imposed mandates?

Not well. They were extremely disappointed – they’d swapped one empire for another. The state of Iraq, for example, followed a British mandate in 1920 – but, though the British initially promised freedom to the Iraqis, they changed their minds and decided to keep Iraq as a client state. The Iraqis certainly didn’t want to be ruled by Britain, so they launched a huge rebellion against their new mandatory power, which the British brutally crushed. Similarly, the Syrians didn’t want to be ruled by the French, and rebelled in 1925. In 1919, the Egyptians launched a revolution that also resulted in defeat by the British.

You describe the Second World War as the start of a new Middle East. Why?

The Second World War brought about the realisation that the west needed to give independence to the Arab world. During the war, the British occupied southern Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon but, with the European powers financially exhausted by 1945, and the increasing waves of nationalist movements, several of the countries that now make up the Middle East were created as independent nation states. Syria became fully independent in 1946 and, with the termination of the British mandate for Palestine, Israel was created in 1948. Turkey had already formed in 1923, and the British mandate over Iraq had ended in 1932.

Following the world wars, a new Middle East was born – with varying degrees of success. Many of these new states proved either ungovernable or dominated by autocrats – and that’s another of the central debates that runs through the book: who or what should we blame for the failure of many of these states? Is it their corrupt oligarchical dictatorial rulers? Or the imperial powers that created the states? Does it come down to Arab culture or Jewish nationalism? Was it the creation of Israel that poisoned the whole Middle East and made it ungovernable? Or was it the Cold War, and the interference of the Americans and the Soviets, that undermined the Middle Eastern state system? These are all vital questions.

Did new ideologies or identities emerge in these newly established nation states?

With the new states came the rise of Arab nationalism, particularly the ideology of pan-Arabism. This is the idea that the Arab world should be ruled by one state, and it’s a natural reaction to the division of the Middle East by borders drawn by the imperial powers. What’s interesting, though, is that the former imperial powers also embraced Arab nationalism. They wanted to create strong Arab states, and it was actually Britain that sponsored the creation of the Arab League, which promoted the idea that the separate states should act together as a community.

For the next 30 years after independence, pan-Arabism became the ruling ideology among Arab leaders including Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and its greatest champion, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Of them, Nasser was the most successful and popular; at his apogee, he united Egypt with Syria as the United Arab Republic in 1958. (Three years later, Syria seceded.)

If pan-Arabism had such powerful political proponents, why did it decline?

In reality, the Arab world is much less monolithic than sometimes we in the west like to think. The different states and regions all had their own dialects, agendas and circumstances, and it’s questionable whether a single Arab state could ever have held together.

It also failed badly, in both governance and war. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt fought Israel in a series of regional conflicts – and each time, Israel won out. The creation of Israel in itself was a huge blow to Arab pride, and its military victories undermined the confidence of the surrounding new nation states. In 1948, the UN partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors, and the State of Israel was declared. Five Arab countries immediately invaded Israel but, with their war aims divided, Israel was able to defeat them all. Then, in 1967, Nasser hubristically threatened war – and was defeated spectacularly by Israel, discrediting Nasserism.

By the 1970s, pan-Arabism was declining and a new ideology, Islamism, was about to explode.

• Read more | How Britain stirred the cauldron of conflict in Palestine

You’ve also described 1979 as a turning point in this history. Why was that year such a decisive moment?

It brought an ideological shift in the Middle East. Islamic anti-western radicalism had always existed in various forms, but in 1979 an Iranian Shia variant mobilised the belief that Islam should govern society as well as the state, in resistance to the west and pro-western versions of Islam. In January of that year, a huge popular revolt overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran, who had ruled Iran for 37 years.

When the country fell to Ayatollah Khomeini, it shook the whole Middle East. Khomeini was an incredibly brutal and oppressive figure with a vision of Islamic rule that had never really been put into practice before. His idea was that, while Shiite Muslims waited for the Occulted Imam to return as Mahdi (Messiah), a trusted member of the Islamic clergy should rule Iran. With this Islamist ideology, Khomeini created an extraordinary system that was really a sacred monarchy ruled by one man – himself. That is still the system ruling Iran today.

So, first of all, a new system was created in 1979 in Iran – a Shia theocracy, a sacred dictatorship – and, at the same time, the revolution also unleashed a radical Islamism on the rest of the Muslim world. This was a fusion of Sunni Islamist radicalism, Arab nationalism and Arab resistance, making it distinctly anti-western.

If 1979 unleashed the ideological movement, we now see its manifestation in all sorts of ways. Radical Islamism became a resistance movement against a version of moderate Islam that was open to western ideas in pro-American states such as Egypt, Jordan, UAE and, to an extent, Saudi Arabia. Today, we see the influence of Khomeini’s Islamism in Hezbollah in Lebanon and in Hamas in Gaza.

Following the end of the Cold War, did the Middle Eastern states start to become more stable?

No – and where it looked stable, that was due to the stagnant, oppressive rule of long-reigning dictators: Gaddafi, Saddam, Mubarak, Assad. It’s a question that you could ask at any point during the history of the region – or, as I’ve called it, The Cauldron – and you’d get the same answer. This is a story of continued tumultuous bubbling, which is why I gave the book its title.

Having said that, we do see something different after the fall of the Soviet Union: the emergence of the US as a unipolar paramount power in the Middle East. To be fair to the Americans, they did try to use this power in a positive way to create a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Though these attempts are now discredited among many people, they nearly worked. Israel and Palestine needed to recognise the other’s existence, national narratives and possible Palestinian statehood – and, for around two decades (1990–2012), there were people in both nations who were willing to do so. The Madrid Conference took place in 1991 under George HW Bush, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 under Bill Clinton, but ultimately peace fell through. Israel-Palestine peace looks incredibly distant now. I still believe that a pathway to two republics, two nations, is the only way – but that means many things.

The rest of the Middle East also didn’t gain stability. It is important to note, though, that by that stage the Middle Eastern states were no longer dominated by imperialist powers, and the end of superpower competition gave them more space to assert themselves. After the end of the Cold War, they were freer than they ever had been. This idea – that the Middle Eastern states were not simply subject to greater powers but had their own agency – is another key theme in the book. The Middle Eastern states really recreated themselves, and they’ve been independent for almost 80 years now.

How much of the recent turbulence in the Middle East do you think stems from the attacks on 9/11?

A lot of it. The story of Osama bin Laden and his ‘Planes Operation’, as he called it, is just extraordinary. It was intended to draw the US into the Middle East – and it worked. When Joe Biden flew to Israel after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, he said of 9/11: “We overreacted”. There are arguments to say that’s true.

There was definitely a case for invading Afghanistan in 2001, but the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, I think, totally misconceived. It was based on false intelligence, but even if you believe that the invasion was justified, it was utterly misgoverned. The Iraq War was a disaster, its main effect being to empower a rising Middle Eastern state: Iran. The US knocked out the other great power in the Middle East, Iraq, and the country never recovered. To be clear, I’m not nostalgic for Saddam, but I think there’s something to be said for a measured response, particularly in the Middle East.

Why do you think that democracy has made few inroads in the region?

There are all sorts of reasons across the different Middle Eastern countries. I don’t think for a moment you could say that the Arab world is not suited to democracy, but there is a habitual resort to autocracy. I think this comes from the belief that only an autocrat is strong enough to hold together disparate states and resist Islamism, which often resorts to armed revolution. That’s combined with a long Middle Eastern tradition of one-man rule – sultanates, kingdoms. The best-ruled countries in the Middle East are actually the absolute monarchies that weren’t created by the west but grew organically – such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Morocco.

Conflict remains ongoing in the Middle East. Do you think that it is somehow an inherently violent place?

I don’t think that’s really true. If you look at the Middle East across the 20th century, the number of deaths never came close to the bloodletting of the world wars in Europe, or Stalin’s Red Terror, or Hitler’s Holocaust, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Statistics are sometimes used in a distasteful parlour game of ‘who’s worst’, and I don’t want to play. But, if you look at the pure numbers of people killed in the entire Israel-Arab-Palestine conflict from 1948 to today, it’s a mere iota of those killed just on the western front in the First World War.

That said, every death is a tragedy. The Middle East is a very turbulent place – a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian patchwork with so many interwoven layers of tension piled on top of each other. There’s nothing quite like it.

• Read more | The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe

Why is understanding this history so important?

The truth matters in itself. Its moral lessons matter, and anything based on lies and conspiracies is brittle and will crumble. Our societies are successful because we respect facts, sources, truth – and that encompasses history. In the post-religious, post-Christian world of the west, history has assumed a moral importance that allows it to be a propellant of political power, similar to the power that religion once had.

And for history to matter, it has to be right. That’s why this book aims to show how the present Middle East –19 states in all – came to be, and how to understand the nuances that created it. I don’t just mean Israel and Palestine. You can’t really understand Saudi Arabia unless you realise that it’s the third Saudi Arabian kingdom, not the first. You can’t really understand what’s happening in Iran unless you understand Twelver Shiism and who the last shah was. You can’t understand Turkey without understanding Ataturk.

In a way, I think it’s strange that this book didn’t exist before. There are histories of the Arabs, of the Jews and of the Turks, but no one had put it together. I’ve tried to do it in a nuanced and balanced way that is entirely based on fact – though myths and conspiracies are important, too. But I also want this to be a great read. So you can read it as the history of how the Middle East came to be what it is today – or you can just enjoy this extraordinary story.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and historian. His previous books include Jerusalem: The Biography (W&N, 2011, revised in 2024) and The World: A Family History (W&N, 2022)

This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Are these history's greatest losers? 19 people who had glory snatched away from them https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-historys-greatest-losers-19-people-who-had-glory-snatched-away-from-them/ Sun, 27 Sep 2026 14:30:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-historys-greatest-losers-19-people-who-had-glory-snatched-away-from-them/ History may celebrate the winners, but what about those who came tantalisingly close to the top spot? Jonny Wilkes shines a light on 19 famous ‘almosts’ At the 2026 London Marathon, Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe made history by becoming the first runner ever to finish the 26.2 miles in under two hours, breaking the tape with a time of 1:59:30. While the crowd cheered and the commentators tried to capture the significance of the moment, another runner, Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia, quietly passed the finish line too, and also under two hours. While still a remarkable achievement, it is doomed to be overshadowed by Sawe – and all for the sake of 11 seconds.

Second place, the silver medal, the so-called ‘first loser’: it can be a heartbreaking position, to be so close and yet so far from the ultimate glory. (Before you feel too bad for Kejelcha, though, it is worth noting that this was his first-ever marathon, so imagine what he could accomplish with more training.)

Whether in the field of exploration, invention, politics or sport, history is replete with examples of close-but-no-cigar runners-up, although their names don’t fill as much space in the history books as the ones who pipped them. Here, we reveal the worst cases of second-place fever, from those who fell agonisingly short and missed out in a cloud of controversy to those who seemed destined to lose and set the unwanted records.

1. Robert Falcon Scott

Second to the South Pole

In 1910, the British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott set out on his British Antarctic Expedition – often known as the Terra Nova expedition – with the goal of reaching the South Pole, something no human had done before.

On the way, however, he learned that he had a challenger in the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who navigated the Northwest Passage a few years earlier. Amundsen had actually intended to conquer the North Pole, but on hearing that someone else may have beaten him to it he turned his ship south instead.

Scott’s quest for glory turned to despair: by the time he reached the Pole on 17 January 1912, he found that Amundsen had already been there, more than a month previously, and he along with the four other men in his party would perish on the 800-mile return journey.

2. John Landy

Second to run a four-minute mile

On 6 May 1954, British medical student and Olympic athlete Roger Bannister achieved what was thought to be physically impossible. Described as “sport’s greatest goal”, he ran a mile in under four minutes. His name went into the history books, but his time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds lasted in the record books for just 46 days.

The Australian sensation John Landy shocked the crowd at a meet in Finland by setting a new time of 3 minutes 57.9 seconds. That August, the two men met on the track. Dubbed the ‘Miracle Mile’, it was a titanic duel with both men running under four minutes again, but it was Bannister who came first once again.

3. Elisha Gray

Second to invent the telephone

Elisha Gray was one of several people working on a device to transmit sounds telegraphically in the 1870s, but the American succeeded in coming up with a design for what would soon be known as the telephone. The only problem was that on the exact day he announced his intention to patent his invention, 14 February 1876, the Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell filed his own application at the US Patent Office. There the controversy began as an acrimonious legal battle ensued before Bell’s “instrument” came out on top.

4. Alan Shepard

Second person in space

One of the Mercury Seven, the inaugural group of NASA astronauts, Alan Shepard was scheduled to be the first person in space. His flight on the Freedom 7 capsule had an initial launch date of March 1961, but it was postponed to May due to rigorous testing and safety checks.

The two-month delay allowed the Soviet Union to claim a major early victory in the Space Race by sneaking ahead of the United States and launching the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 in April.

Following his own historic flight, Shepard would go on to walk on the Moon as commander of Apollo 14 in 1971, marking the moment with a first of his own by hitting two golf balls on the lunar surface.

5. Jack Nicklaus

Second in golf majors the most times

The American golfer’s reputation is unsurpassed: he won 18 majors between 1962 and 1986, putting him at the top of the pile in the history of the sport. What is more impressive, though, is that the Golden Bear’s record could have been even better if he had not come second in a major no less than 19 times. Five of these came in a playoff or by a single stroke.

6. Raymond Poulidor

'The Eternal Second' of the Tour de France

It did not take long from its inception in 1903 for the Tour de France to become the most prestigious cycling race in the world, where the greatest on two wheels competed for the famed yellow jersey.

To date, four men have won it five times, but unfortunately for Raymond Poulidor, two of those raced at the same time as him. Across his 14 appearances from 1962 to 1976, the French cyclist finished on the podium eight times without ever toppling the likes of compatriot Jacques Anquetil and Belgian Eddy Merckx.

For that, Poulidor, a hugely popular figure in the sport, earned the affectionate nickname of ‘The Eternal Second’.

• Read more | Sportswashing: have nations always used sport to launder their reputations?

7. Francis Drake

Second to circumnavigate the world

The Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan left Spain in 1519 on an expedition that would eventually complete the first circumnavigation of the world. While he gets the credit, he did not live to see Spain again – he was killed in the Philippines in 1521 – so it fell to Spanish navigator Juan Sebastian Elcano, with a crew of just 17 Europeans, to bring the expedition home.

It would be over half a century before another explorer, Francis Drake, replicated the feat, leaving Plymouth in 1577 and returning in 1580.

8. Rosalind Franklin

Second to Watson and Crick

The 1953 discovery of the double helix structure of DNA changed science and medicine forever. It is attributed to two molecular biologists, American James Watson and Englishman Francis Crick, but another scientist made invaluable contributions to the breakthrough and has historically been overlooked.

The chemist Rosalind Franklin took an X-Ray diffraction image of DNA fibre, which was a breakthrough in revealing DNA’s helical structure. Photo 51, as it became known, was then shown to Watson and Crick – without Franklin’s knowledge – allowing them to further their own research.

Franklin died of cancer in 1958, before Watson, Crick and her colleague Maurice Wilkins collected the Nobel Prize. If she had lived, she may well have joined them.

9. Washington Generals

Second to the Harlem Globetrotters

The ultimate exhibition team – not just in basketball, but all sports – the Harlem Globetrotters have delighted crowds with their unmatched skills and antics for nearly 100 years. What would they be, however, without a rival team to humiliate?

That’s where the Washington Generals come in. Since 1952, the Generals have been the regular foil to the Globetrotters’ showboating, which means they’ve lost a lot. In fact, they have been on the wrong side of the scoreboard more than 17,000 times, and in return they have only won a handful of times and none since 1971.

10. Netherlands football team

Second in the World Cup twice in a row

The Netherlands side of the 1970s is often described as the best football team never to win a FIFA World Cup. Not only was the captain one of the greatest to play the game, Johann Cruyff, but thanks to their manager Rinus Michels they had perfected a revolutionary style of play, known as ‘Total Football’.

By qualifying for the 1974 tournament, the Dutch appeared at a World Cup for the first time in 36 years and were favoured to lift the trophy. They conceded just one goal en route to the final, but lost to West Germany. The Netherlands returned four years later, without their talismanic captain, and again made it all the way only to lose again, this time to Argentina in extra time.

11. Citizen Kane

Second in the Oscars

To this day, Orson Welles’ debut feature film, Citizen Kane, regularly appears on, if not tops, the lists of greatest movies ever made. Yet the 1941 epic cannot count among its many accolades a certain golden statuette.

At the 1942 Oscars, Citizen Kane and Welles failed to win Best Picture and Best Director respectively, both losing out to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. While highly regarded, the classic drama about a Welsh coal mining family drama hardly boasts the enduring impact of Welles’s magnum opus.

12. Buzz Aldrin

Second to walk on the Moon

It is one of the most famous events in human history: 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon, and the world watches as the first step is made with the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And the astronaut who uttered that immortal line was Neil Armstrong. Yet it could have been Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin.

It had become custom in Nasa for a mission’s junior officer to be the first out of the capsule for spacewalks – which suggests Aldrin should have got the nod – but the decision was taken that Armstrong’s level-headed, ego-free demeanour was more fitting for the historic moment.

When Aldrin joined his mission commander a few moments later, he described what he saw with his own piece of poetry: “Magnificent desolation.”

• Read more | The history of the first moon landing: the road to Apollo 11

13. Bertha von Suttner

Second woman to win a Nobel Prize

Marie Curie is celebrated around the world as a pioneer in physics and chemistry, and for breaking ground for female scientists. Her research on radiation secured her a Nobel Prize in 1903 – making her the first woman to be a Nobel laureate – and she followed that by winning another, in 1911, for discovering the elements radium and polonium.

Just two years after Curie’s first prize, the Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner won her own, the Peace Prize for “her audacity to oppose the horrors of war”.

It would be 1935 before the next woman won a Nobel Prize in the sciences, Irène Joliot-Curie, Marie’s daughter.

14. Alfred Russel Wallace

Second to come up with the theory of evolution

It is unfair to say the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was ‘second’ to develop the theory of evolution through natural selection, behind Charles Darwin. He came up with it independently, based on years travelling in the Amazon River basin and Malay Archipelago, and even wrote down his findings before Darwin published his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species (1859).

While that ensured Darwin’s title as father of evolutionary theory, Wallace never resented his situation and remained one of his compatriot’s most vocal supporters.

15. Buffalo Bills

Second in the Super Bowl four times in a row

While the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers have each won the Super Bowl, the biggest prize in American Football, six times, the Buffalo Bills hold the less-auspicious record of having the most consecutive appearances at the big game without bagging a single Vince Lombardi Trophy.

From 1991 to 1994, the star-studded Bills lost to the New York Giants – having missed a last-second field goal to win – the Washington Redskins (now Commanders) and the Dallas Cowboys twice. They have not been back to the Super Bowl since.

16. Al Gore

Second in the 2000 US presidential election

Never has an election for President of the United States been more contentious and contested as in 2000. The Republican candidate George W Bush, son of a former president, eventually claimed victory over the Democrat, Al Gore, but only after weeks of recounts and legal tussles.

Gore actually got more votes on election day, 7 November, but to win required securing a majority in the Electoral College, and it quickly became clear that this entirely depended on who won the state of Florida.

There, the race was extraordinarily close with just a few hundred ballots separating the two out of the millions cast. The matter went to the courts, culminating in the Supreme Court’s bitterly disputed decision in mid-December to stop further recounts in Florida, and so sealing the narrowest of winning margins for Bush.

17. Christopher Marlowe

Second to William Shakespeare

This English playwright and poet was the toast of Elizabethan London. No, not that one. Christopher Marlowe enjoyed a stellar few years thanks to plays like Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus.

Then, on 30 May 1593, he was killed at the age of 29, apparently in a tavern brawl, although his death continues to be the subject of mystery, intrigue and conspiracy theories.

In the vacuum he left stepped one of his contemporaries, a man born the same year and who had been inspired by Marlowe’s works; the most famous dramatist of his, or indeed any, era, William Shakespeare.

18. Jimmy White

Second in the World Snooker Championship six times

Jimmy White had two nicknames, ‘The Whirlwind’ for his quick and attacking play, and ‘The People’s Champion’. The latter is an acknowledgement of the title that eluded the English star his whole career, the World Snooker Championship, the top prize in the sport.

He got so close by making the final six times between 1984 and 1994, including five years in a row, but always fell short. The two losses that proved especially painful came in 1992, when he let a commanding lead slip by losing 10 consecutive frames, and 1994, when he missed a simple black in the deciding frame. Both were to seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry.

• Read more | London 1908 was the weirdest Winter Olympics in history – and here's why

19. The Australian army

Second to a mob of emus

In November 1932, the Australian military – in truth, a handful of soldiers with machine guns and lots of ammunition – were dispatched to carry out a rather extreme form of animal control against the emu population. The flightless birds had become a pest to wheat farmers. By December, the army, who wasted bullets by killing less than 1,000 of the c20,000 emus, had no choice but to withdraw and admit defeat in the Great Emu War.

]]> The making of the modern Middle East https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-making-of-the-modern-middle-east-podcast/ Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:33:18 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-making-of-the-modern-middle-east-podcast/ Simon Sebag Montefiore discusses his new book exploring the forces and figures that forged the Middle East The Middle East has, for decades, been riven by violent conflict. But what are the roots and ongoing causes of this violence? In this episode, Simon Sebag Montefiore discusses The Cauldron, his new book exploring the forces and figures that forged the region.

Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Simon takes us from the creation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, through the decline of the imperial powers and the rise of Pan-Arabism, to 9/11 and the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

]]> "He came out of the Valleys like a projectile" – and altered the course of British history https://www.historyextra.com/membership/he-came-out-of-the-valleys-like-a-projectile-and-altered-the-course-of-british-history/ Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:30:31 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/he-came-out-of-the-valleys-like-a-projectile-and-altered-the-course-of-british-history/ Producer, actor and writer Jonny Owen chooses Nye Bevan (1897–1960) as his history hero In profile

Nye Bevan was a Welsh Labour politician best known for the key role he played, as Minister of Health, in creating the National Health Service and for his wider role in the founding of Britain’s welfare state. Bevan, the MP for Ebbw Vale from 1929–60, went on to serve as shadow foreign secretary (1956–60), and deputy leader of the Labour Party and deputy leader of the opposition (1959–60). He died in 1960, aged 62.

When did you first hear about Bevan?

He died just over 10 years before I was born, but he was such a mythical figure in south Wales, where I grew up, that I heard about him as a kid. “This was the guy,” I was told in that very Welsh way, “who invented the National Health Service.”

What kind of man was he?

Born in modern-day Blaenau Gwent, south Wales, he left school at 13 and followed his father down the pit, at a time when the Welsh coalfields were powering much of the world’s industry. Bevan, a man of great energy with a huge appetite for life, came out of the valleys “like a projectile”, and I think saw himself as a man of destiny who had been put on Earth to make the world a fairer place.

• Read more | How Britain fell in love with the NHS

What made Bevan a hero?

The role he played in creating the welfare state. There was no safety net for the working classes in the Britain of Bevan’s youth. So if a woman’s husband was injured or died, she and her children could soon find themselves on the breadline, in the absence of a supportive family. Similarly, child mortality was a fact of life in the 1920s in areas like south Wales – for instance, three of my grandfather’s siblings died as children. The welfare state, imperfect as it may be, is one of his greatest legacies.

What was Bevan’s finest hour?

It’s got to be the pivotal role that he played in creating the NHS, despite the opposition of the British Medical Association among others. It took courage to force through the legislation necessary – he was branded everything from a ‘communist’ to a ‘fascist’ for wanting to create an organisation providing medical health care free at the point of need across the UK. I think he’d be disappointed by some of the ‘privatisation by stealth’ over recent decades, and the overall state of today’s NHS.

• Read more | Why does Britain keep changing prime ministers? The answer lies in history

Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about him?

Yes, the fact that he never seems to have given much consideration to his own health – smoking, drinking and eating what he wanted. I wish someone had taken him aside and said: Why does Britain keep changing prime ministers? The answer lies in history“If you don’t look after yourself, you’re not going to last.”

Can you see any parallels between Bevan’s life and your own?

I’d never compare myself to him, but he felt his background influenced everything he did, and I feel that too. Being a proud son of Merthyr Tydfil, with a similar coal-mining background in my own family, I think we’d have got on well.

What would you ask Bevan if you could meet him?

He never seems to have expressed any interest in sport, which is unusual in the valleys. So I’d ask him if he was a sports fan – and, if so, what sport he most enjoyed.

Jonny Owen has appeared in TV shows such as Shameless and My Family, and won a Welsh Bafta for the documentary The Aberfan Disaster, which he co-produced. Britain’s Murder Map with Vicky McClure and Jonny Owen is streaming on History Play

This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Why does Britain keep changing prime ministers? The answer lies in history https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-does-britain-keep-changing-prime-ministers-the-answer-lies-in-history/ Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:30:47 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-does-britain-keep-changing-prime-ministers-the-answer-lies-in-history/ Prime ministers rarely enjoy an easy ride – but occupants of number 10 seem to have been particularly vulnerable over the past decade. Tim Bale compares modern pressures with previous periods of instability at the top of the political pyramid Enoch Powell, in his biography of Victorian politician Joseph Chamberlain, famously declared that “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

Chamberlain never made it to the very top of what Benjamin Disraeli memorably called “the greasy pole” – unlike his son Neville, who did. But for the seven men and women to have occupied the post of prime minister between 2016 and 2026, only for their time in office to be “cut off in midstream” at anything but “a happy juncture”, Powell’s characteristically pessimistic take must surely resonate.

Quite why the UK has managed to burn through so many prime ministers in the space of a decade is a question well worth exploring. But it’s also worth asking whether that churn is as unprecedented as many assume – and whether it’s something to which we need to become accustomed: the ‘new normal’, as it were.

Familiar story

Actually, we’ve been here before – several times, in fact. Between the years 1916 and 1940, for example, Britain had no fewer than 10 prime ministers, though admittedly a couple of them served more than once – Stanley Baldwin three times, Ramsay MacDonald twice. In the 13 years between 1951 and 1964, six individuals served as PM. And between 1970 and 1979, the late queen ‘kissed hands’ with new leaders on four separate occasions.

Moreover, though recent events have generated all sorts of explanations as to why Downing Street seems to have a pressing need for a revolving door to be installed, the reasons why prime ministers came and went fairly frequently in those earlier periods are actually pretty similar. It’s down to a combination of intraparty and interpersonal bust-ups, policy U-turns and failures – and the hope that a change at the top might stave off electoral defeat.

Obviously, there are one or two differences between the recent and distant pasts. First, owing both to medical advances and to the fact that prime ministers tend to be much younger nowadays, none of the recent run had to step down due to ill health. That’s in marked contrast to some of their 20th-century predecessors: declining health curtailed the premierships of Andrew Bonar Law in 1923, Ramsay MacDonald in 1935 and Winston Churchill in 1955. Second, since 1974 no prime minister defeated at a general election has been permitted by their party to stay on as leader in order to try to win back the keys to number 10. Previously, Baldwin, MacDonald, Churchill and Harold Wilson had done so successfully, Ted Heath markedly less so.

So much for the contrasts. What about the similarities that suggest what we’ve seen since 2016 isn’t quite as novel as we might imagine?

A good place to start might be a century ago. In December 1916, the mercurial Welshman David Lloyd George effectively forced his boss, Herbert Asquith, out of 10 Downing Street by persuading some of his fellow Liberals – as well as Conservative members of the wartime coalition – that the conflict needed a prime minister prepared to secure victory by any means necessary. Shades, surely, of Boris Johnson convincing Tory MPs in 2019 that he – and only he – could “get Brexit done”?

Indeed, the parallels between Johnson and Lloyd George don’t end there. A few years later, in October 1922, while mired in scandal, the prime minister who’d swept all before him in the ‘coupon election’ of 1918 was the victim of what he clearly saw as an outrageous coup against him by a majority of Conservative MPs. Ideologically opposed to many of his policies and convinced that sticking with him could lose them their seats, they replaced him with Bonar Law in the wake of a dramatic meeting at the Carlton Club. That was the very institution where, in June 2022, Tory MP Chris Pincher’s drunken antics triggered the scandal that proved the final straw for those colleagues who wanted rid of Johnson.

• Read more | The downfall of Lloyd George

Our next parallel – this time with Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May – is provided by Stanley Baldwin just a year later, in December 1923. He inherited a workable majority from the dying Bonar Law but, like May, felt that he needed a fresh mandate and, ideally, a bigger majority in order to allow him to push through a controversial departure from the platform on which the Conservatives had fought the previous election.

In May’s case, of course, the issue for which a strong mandate was needed was Brexit – on which her predecessor, David Cameron, had been defeated at the referendum held in June 2016, triggering his resignation. In Baldwin’s case, it was overturning free trade in favour of tariffs and preferential treatment for imports originating in the British empire.

Like May’s gamble, Baldwin’s backfired, resulting in the loss of his majority. But unlike May, he was – despite being a far more skilled politician – unable to cobble together an arrangement with another party that would have allowed him to carry on in Number 10. That failure ushered in the country’s first Labour government in January 1924.

New rival

Ramsay MacDonald’s minority Labour government lasted less than a year before it was defeated in a vote of no confidence, after which Baldwin’s Tories were returned at the October 1924 general election with a landslide majority. But MacDonald’s party performed well enough to ensure that, from then on, the Conservatives’ main rivals would be Labour rather than the Liberals.

Sadly for MacDonald, however, his second term as prime minister, which began in 1929, proved disastrous. Labour MPs and ministers – not for the last time – baulked at their PM and chancellor’s plans to cut public spending and benefits in order to assuage the markets, the media and the opposition. This rebellion prompted MacDonald to jump ship and head up the National Government dominated by Baldwin’s Conservatives.

In 1937, Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as PM, then himself resigned in May 1940 having lost the support of hundreds of Tory MPs following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway in April that year. His downfall demonstrates the difficulty (indeed, the impossibility) of carrying on once a significant section of a prime minister’s own colleagues turn against them in the wake of a major policy failure. That’s what happened to Theresa May after her repeated inability to secure an EU withdrawal agreement; to Liz Truss following her disastrous ‘mini-budget’ in autumn 2022; and, of course, to their iconic predecessor Margaret Thatcher, who was ditched when her flagship poll tax looked set to cost the Tories the next election.

Anthony Eden suffered the same fate in 1956, having been forced by US pressure to end the Anglo-French military operation to snatch back the Suez Canal, after it had been nationalised by Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser. It is, nevertheless, important to note that, notwithstanding the fact that he had won a comfortable election victory for the Conservatives not long after taking over from Churchill in 1955, Eden (like May, Johnson, Truss and, now, Keir Starmer) had been driving many of his cabinet colleagues to distraction for some time. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that many of them were, frankly, glad to see the back of him when illness provided the excuse that allowed him to jump before he was pushed.

Rich pickings

The same could be said of Eden’s successor, Harold Macmillan. In October 1963, as his political luck seemed to be running out, he suddenly quit after being temporarily hospitalised. Much to the chagrin of some of the younger members of his cabinet, he helped to ensure that he was replaced not by their favourite, Rab Butler, but by the Tory peer Alec Douglas-Home.

• Read more | Churchill's ‘finest hour’ helped defeat the Nazis. But was it a double-edged sword?

The parallel in that case is with Rishi Sunak – and not just because Home was in all probability the wealthiest prime minister of the 20th century, just as Sunak was the wealthiest of the 21st. Like many so-called ‘takeover’ prime ministers, both men – having acceded to the role in controversial circumstances and, therefore, needing to keep as many of their MPs onside as possible – felt unable to ditch policies, priorities and cabinet colleagues that were past their sell-by dates. John Major, who managed to signal a sufficiently significant change from Margaret Thatcher to enable him to win the Conservatives their fourth consecutive term in 1992, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. Sadly for Gordon Brown – like Eden, a number two forced to wait too long before becoming captain of the ship – he didn’t manage to pull off the same trick when he took over from Tony Blair in 2007.

It might, however, be a tad unfair to say the same about Jim Callaghan, who succeeded Harold Wilson in 1976 after a Labour leadership contest widely thought to have included the most impressive group of politicians ever to have fought for the premiership.

The authority of every one of the prime ministers who occupied Downing Street after 2016 was eroded by ministerial departures resulting from policy disagreements, personal ambition or a combination of both. Callaghan, though, managed to push a swingeing IMF-inspired cuts package through his cabinet without a single resignation before his government was defeated by Margaret Thatcher three years later. The same, incidentally, applies to Thatcher’s much-maligned predecessor as Tory leader, Ted Heath. He felt that he had to perform a series of spectacular U-turns to cope with similarly challenging economic circumstances as prime minister between 1970 and 1974, the year when he was defeated in two general elections (one in February, the other in October) by Harold Wilson.

Wilson, having achieved his ambition of regaining the majority he unexpectedly lost in 1970, chose to honour a promise he’d made to his family a few years previously by handing over to Callaghan after 18 months. That made him one of only two prime ministers in the past 100 years to have defied Powell’s aphorism, by leaving Downing Street at a time of their own choosing and with at least a modicum of popularity still remaining. The other was Stanley Baldwin, who had handed over to Neville Chamberlain in 1937.

Impossible job?

In a parliamentary system such as Britain’s, governments are perfectly entitled to swap prime ministers without holding an election. That they have done so five times since 2016 is actually nothing new. In fact, as we have seen, it is by no means uncommon, having happened five times between 1916 and 1940 and six times between 1945 and 2007. The big difference, of course, is the rate at which they have effected such a swap: five times in just 10 years compared with 24 and 62 years, respectively.

One commonly heard explanation for this acceleration is that the job of prime minister has simply become more difficult – perhaps even impossible – over time. Clearly there is some truth in that view: the state has assumed more responsibilities over the past 100 or so years, and running it has become more complex than used to be the case. Meanwhile, the increasing demands on the role imposed by the advent of 24-hour news and social media have also made the spotlight on the PM a whole lot harsher.

As we have seen, though, even in the early part of the 20th century, the geopolitical, financial and internal party pressures under which prime ministers operated were often intense, as was competition among their colleagues to replace them given half the chance. All of which suggests that the explanation for the accelerating rate of churn may actually lie elsewhere.

• Read more | Alleged coups and government traitors: conspiracy theories in 20th-century British politics

A far bigger difference between the recent and more distant pasts is the sheer volatility of the modern British electorate. Voters today will swiftly switch their support if their (arguably unrealistic and inflated) expectations aren’t immediately met. And that’s much harder for governments to do now that rapid economic growth seems to be more and more difficult to generate.

Is it any wonder, then, that MPs, bombarded as they now are by opinion polls that suggest they’re going to lose their seats unless they make a change, act accordingly – and more often, and more ruthlessly, than ever before?

Tim Bale is professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London

This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Are there still fascists in the 21st century? Six experts weigh up the evidence https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-there-still-fascists-in-the-21st-century-six-experts-weigh-up-the-evidence/ Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:00:13 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-there-still-fascists-in-the-21st-century-six-experts-weigh-up-the-evidence/ Fascism is a word thrown around increasingly frequently in today’s politics, but how do contemporary far-right movements compare to the original fascism of the 20th century? Six historians consider the global parallels “Post-fascism wishes to destroy democracy from within, not from outside”

Democracy took different forms throughout history; why not fascism? Its contemporary expression is undoubtedly dissimilar from its ancestors between the two world wars, but some basic features are easily detectable: a project of national ‘regeneration’, considering nation as a closed, homogeneous ethnic community; a radical nationalism taking a pronounced xenophobic and racist taste; and authoritarian tendencies that put into question democracy.

Classical fascism was neither conservative nor merely reactionary: instead of looking to the past, it aimed to build a new world. Its charismatic leaders were demagogues, and it fused anti-Enlightenment culture with modernity and new forms of inequality (Social Darwinism, biological racism, imperialism).

Today, a new wave of authoritarian, far-right movements and governments is rising globally. Its leaders have abandoned any reference to fascism, but maybe we are facing a kind of ‘post-fascism’, a concept that refers to both a historical distance from classical fascism and a significant change to its ideological and political features. Unlike its ancestors, post-fascism accepts the institutional framework of liberal democracy; it wishes to destroy democracy from within, not from outside.

Other differences are significant. Except for a few elitist billionaires and technocrats, post-fascism does not possess any utopian vision. It defends many conservative values – traditions, family, national sovereignties – and wishes to restore a past golden age of greatness and prosperity. It does not pursue the myth of a ‘total state’ but claims the dismantlement of the state itself. Today, Islamophobia has replaced antisemitism as the dominant focus, and some far-right voices are enthusiastic supporters of Israel. What remains is demagoguery: the search for a scapegoat that depicts immigrants and refugees as intruders and a threat.

Democracy is not merely a procedural norm but a hard-won historical achievement, and antifascism is essential to preserving an emancipatory horizon in the century ahead. A ‘non-anti-fascist’ democracy would be fragile and vulnerable.

Enzo Traverso is the Susan and Barton Winokur professor in the Humanities at Cornell University

• Read more | Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s

“Men today are vulnerable to the rhetoric and aesthetics of fascism”

Violent masculinity is making a global comeback. Some of the distorted ideas about manhood that underpinned 20th-century fascism are finding new expressions today, fuelled by the global polycrisis and rapid technological change.

Classical fascism promoted a version of manhood characterised by dominance, aggression and discipline. From Mussolini’s Italy to Hitler’s Germany, 20th-century fascism saw the glorification of the ‘strong man’ leader who built cults of personality, bolstered by a wider societal celebration of physical toughness. In the First World War’s aftermath, trauma, uncertainty and social change contributed to what many scholars described as a crisis of masculinity across Europe. Fascist leaders told their followers they had been mistreated and promised to restore their strength and pride.

There is a striking parallel with the victimhood narratives deployed by contemporary demagogues. Men today are similarly vulnerable to the rhetoric and aesthetics of fascism. What paramilitary and physical conditioning drills were for the Hitler Youth in the 1930s, hypermasculine fitness and combat subcultures have become for some of today’s extremist movements.

The resurgence of centuries-old masculinity myths extends far beyond extremist circles. A new generation of boys and young men is drawn to the cult-like atmosphere of the Manosphere. We also witness a global return of political ‘strong man’ leaders who project violent ideals of masculinity and seek to reverse women’s rights.

Boys and men are again being told that they must be strong, wealthy and dominant to succeed in a zero-sum competition for status and recognition. Likewise, ‘looksmaxxing’ may be a new term, but its underlying philosophy is not: the belief that there is a single ideal male form.

One of the lessons from the 20th century is that the political theatre of ‘strong man’ leaders only works when there is a receptive audience. This is where the day-to-day youth trends in schools and online subcultures connect with geopolitics today.

Julia Ebner is leader of the Violent Extremism Lab at the University of Oxford and a postdoctoral researcher at Magdalen College

“Radical rightwing populists are worse than contemporary fascists”

In 1944 George Orwell wrote an article despairing of the way fascism had degenerated into a nebulous label. Eighty years on it is even more difficult to apply the word meaningfully. It is only since the 1990s that a working definition has gained scholarly consensus, not as a true definition but the most heuristically useful one to date.

This sees fascism as a radically anti-democratic and revolutionary force bent on bringing about the rebirth of the nation from perceived decadence through the mass mobilisation of all ‘true’ members of the regenerated national community. The shorthand for this theory of fascism as a revolutionary form of extreme illiberal nationalism is taken from one influential version of it, which I first published in 1991, namely that it is a ‘palingenetic’ form of populist ultranationalism. ‘Palingenetic’ means it is striving for rebirth; ‘nationalism’ locates it within secularising western states; the ‘ultra’ implies it strives to replace liberal democratic nationalism with a totalitarian new order; and ‘populist’ highlights the fact that a fascist state is different from a purely Orwellian one based on repression.

Applied today, this definition suggests there is no fascist regime anywhere in the world: Putin’s state is a repressive autocracy which demobilises the people; Xi Jinping’s China is de facto ultranationalist but theoretically a communist state which also demobilises its subjects; the Ayatollah state is a theocracy; Modi, Trump and Netanyahu are sowing social conflict, and have been accused of crimes against humanity, but are doing so as democratically elected leaders.

They thus pose existential threats to liberal democracy, but they do so as embodiments of radical rightwing populism (RRWP) who are actively de-liberalising their democracies from within. They are not fascists, but worse. They may not sound as dangerous to humanity as ‘fascists’, but their state forms of RRWP represent a far greater threat today to both humanity and the ecosystem than contemporary fascism, which is now a toxic trickle compared with the raging torrent of the 1930s.

Roger Griffin is professor emeritus at Oxford Brookes University and author of The Nature of Fascism (The Pinter Press, 1991)

• Read more | George Orwell: the indomitable life of the writer who confronted totalitarianism

“Some female leaders present feminism as a threat to the nation”

The Sección Femenina, the Women’s Section of the Falange, shows that women’s political participation has not always been tied to emancipatory projects. Founded in 1934 as part of the Spanish fascist party, it became responsible for teaching women what it regarded as appropriate to their sex: to be wives, mothers, housewives and servants of the nation.

The distinctive feature of the Women’s Section was that this mission was carried out by a public, disciplined and politically influential female elite, whose lives did not conform to the domestic ideal they prescribed for other women. They held office, travelled, spoke in public and negotiated spaces of power within the regime. To make such authority acceptable, they looked to historical figures. The 15th and 16th-century Spanish queen Isabella I of Castile was the most effective of these, as she could be presented as Catholic, a wife and mother, and bound to the destiny of the nation.

The comparison with Spain’s far right today needs to be made carefully. Vox, the leading far-right party, operates in a democracy and has no organisation comparable to the Sección Femenina. Yet comparison raises the question of what happens when women give public authority to anti-feminist arguments? In Vox, some female leaders and spokeswomen present feminism as a threat to women, the family, men and the nation. It is no coincidence that the party has recently returned to Isabella I of Castile as a female model.

This combination of Spanish nationalism and maternalist language also appears in the discourse of some women on the contemporary far right, who present women as guardians of society against currents they describe as harmful or alien to the nation, including feminism, socialism and non-Christian faiths. Women’s public presence in the far right has helped, and continues to help, present anti-feminism as a defence of women, rather than as a reaction against them. As both historical fascism and the contemporary far right show, the projects most hostile to feminism need women capable of giving them authority, respectability and legitimacy.

Begoña Barrera López is a professor in contemporary history at the University of Seville

“In interwar Estonia, the radical right approached the ‘race’ question with caution”

Thinking through a racial lens appealed to the ultranationalist sensibility. Racial theories could justify beliefs in the nation’s superiority or distinctiveness as a biological reality. This could be protected, improved or regenerated through eugenic interventions such as bans on racial mixing.

In interwar Estonia, however, the radical right approached the ‘race’ question with ambivalence and caution. Historically, Estonians occupied a lower rank on a racial hierarchy, and western racial theorists categorised Finno-Ugric speakers, such as Finns and Estonians, as ‘Asiatic’ races.

Aware of the disadvantages, the Estonian radical right criticised German claims of racial purity and superiority, while its dominant force, the Vaps movement, dismissed race as irrelevant. Instead, it argued that the spirit of the War of Independence (1918–20) was what really unified the nation, accepted Baltic German veterans of the War of Independence into their ranks and actively courted ethnic Russian voters.

Meanwhile, elitist radical right fringe groups explored ways to change the Estonian narratives of race. Intellectuals emphasised historical ties with Scandinavia and highlighted what were considered signs of the Nordic racial elements in Estonians. Eugenicists warned against mixed marriages to protect Estonian biological distinctiveness.

Unlike their northern neighbour, the far right in interwar Latvia experienced fewer constraints rooted in assumptions of racial inferiority; western racial theorists often classified Latvians as ‘Nordic’ or near-Nordic. In the 1930s, the ultranationalist Thunder Cross readily associated ancient Baltic tribes with Aryan racial imagery.

Nowadays, the Estonian far right rally support by anti-immigration rhetoric that portrays non-white populations as threats to Europe. The Russian minority, formerly considered exclusively as threats, is now being approached as a potential electorate with shared conservative values and a white racial identity. The interwar Estonian radical right’s ambivalence about race was based on what is now a historical curiosity no longer relevant for the contemporary far right or their transnational allies.

Paris Pin-Yu Chen is a research fellow at the University of Birmingham

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“Hindu nationalism was and is no copycat fascism. Its ideology is homegrown”

Indian critics have long considered Hindu nationalism to be ‘fascist’, though scholars of the traditional varieties of fascism may not agree. In the Indian case as elsewhere, the ‘f-word’ is used for its polemical punch, but the charge also carries a deeper historical weight. Hindu nationalists and European fascists were keenly aware of each other’s projects in the interwar years, exchanging ideas and seeking ties. Nevertheless, Hindu nationalism was and is no copycat fascism; its ideology, and the immense violence it produces, are homegrown, even as they are deeply contextualised in the global fascist moment of the interwar period and its echoes in our own time.

Hindutva, as Hindu nationalism’s core ideology is called, was first formulated by Vinayak Savarkar in 1923, then updated by Deendayal Upadhyaya, chief ideologue of the BJS, the precursor of India’s current ruling party, the BJP. Its distinguishing feature is its brand of violence, which functions through absorption. Savarkar sought to eradicate Muslims through the reproductive incorporation of Muslim women into the Hindu ‘race’. He produced, from what other racisms called ‘miscegenation’, a robust ideology of race in India.

Under Upadhyaya’s aegis, in 1965, Hindutva was reformulated as Integral Humanism and absorption elevated to a theology. India’s essence was declared to be integrality, or monism, dismissing difference as illusion and rendering the existence of the other as separate from the Hindu self theologically impossible. No future for Muslims in India other than complete erasure can be imagined here.

We know about the exclusion of ‘the other’. Yet violence that functions through the inclusion – as absorption – of ‘the other’ can be just as catastrophic. Hindutva is widely held to be a form of fascism – one that transcends the mere adaptation of European ideas and teaches us about fascism elsewhere. Racism built on miscegenation might at first appear to be different from Nazi racism, yet it resonates with Nazi Germanisation in the occupied east and whitening campaigns in settler colonial contexts. In this way, Indian thought holds universal lessons.

Luna Sabastian is author of Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva (Harvard, 2025)

]]> These are the 27 most important soccer players in history. You probably won't agree with our choices https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-the-27-most-important-soccer-players-in-history-you-probably-wont-agree-with-our-decisions/ Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:30:04 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-the-27-most-important-soccer-players-in-history-you-probably-wont-agree-with-our-decisions/ From pioneers to politicians and legends to legal campaigners, Jonathan Wright profiles the players who have helped to shape history To quote Bill Shankly: “Somebody said that ‘Football is a matter of life and death to you.’ I said: ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’.” The legendary Liverpool manager was trying to convey his passion for the game – and, a point sometimes missed when those words are recounted, his regret at how his family suffered because of his obsession.

Many others have found themselves in the grip of a similar fixation. And, whether or not you personally like the game, football matters. In 1969, El Salvador and Honduras even briefly went to war after a riot broke out at a World Cup qualifier between the two countries. The conflict resulted in thousands of casualties.

Happily, the beautiful game rarely sparks such ugliness, but plenty of characters have lived through other days where history and football have collided in fateful ways.

With a few notable exceptions, the following 27 players aren’t necessarily the greatest names to have kicked a ball. However, on the eve of the latest World Cup, the story of each says something about how the beautiful game both shapes and reflects our world...

1. Arthur Wharton (1865–1930)

Gold Coast-born pioneer

The man widely thought to have been the world’s first black professional footballer was Arthur Wharton. Born in Jamestown – now part of Accra, Ghana – he arrived in England to train as a Methodist missionary. However, he was far more interested in sport than in saving souls.

In 1886, he ran the 100-yard sprint in 10 seconds, equalling the world record. His football career began at Darlington FC. Subsequently, via time with Preston North End, he went professional with Rotherham Town in 1889. Though primarily a goalkeeper, he would also occasionally play on the wing. His later life was steeped in sadness: an alcoholic, he was buried in a pauper’s grave.

2. Herbert Chapman (1878–1934)

Journeyman player, great manager

In the early days of English professional football, teams were run by committees. This approach threw up forward-thinking figures such as Preston North End’s secretary, Major William Suddell, who recruited top players from as far afield as Scotland.

However, the idea of a team manager had yet to coalesce. This changed in the 1920s and 1930s as the figure of the ‘gaffer’ emerged. The greatest of these interwar managers was Herbert Chapman, who built two sides that would go on to win a hat-trick of league titles in successive seasons: Huddersfield Town and Arsenal. Like José Mourinho later, Chapman enjoyed a modest playing career but thought deeply about the game and had a genius for coaching.

3. Walter Tull (1888–1918)

Leader of men

The son of a Barbadian carpenter (whose father had been enslaved) and an English mother, Walter Tull came to prominence playing for amateur side Clapton. In 1909, he signed for Tottenham Hotspur where, because of his mixed heritage, he received abuse from the terraces. In 1911, he moved to Northampton Town.

While nobody doubted Tull’s skill, it’s been suggested he lacked the pace to play at the highest level. Nevertheless, he must have been an impressive figure because, in 1917, after serving on the Western Front, he became one of the first mixed-heritage officers in a regular British Army regiment. He was killed in action in March 1918.

4. José Nasazzi (1901–68)

The captain of them all

Over nearly a century of the global tournament, 22 men and nine women have held aloft the World Cup. They include some of the game’s greatest names: Moore, Beckenbauer, Maradona, Messi and April Heinrichs – captain of the US team that won the first ever FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991.

All followed in the bootprints of Uruguayan defender José Nasazzi. The son of European immigrants, he was known as El Gran Mariscal (The Great Marshal) because of his ability to organise a team. This proved vital in the first-ever World Cup final, held at Estadio Centenario in Montevideo in 1930. Trailing 2–1 to Argentina at half-time, hosts Uruguay fought back to win 4–2.

5. Matthias Sindelar (1903–39)

Principled and brilliant

In 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria. The Austrian national football team – which had reached the World Cup semi-finals in 1934 and was dubbed the Wunderteam – was folded into the German side. Not, though, before the scheduling of a ‘reunification’-celebrating match between Austria and Germany.

After scoring in Austria’s 2–0 victory, it’s said that centre-forward Matthias Sindelar, known as the ‘Mozart of football’, celebrated wildly. He subsequently refused to play for Germany, citing injury and age. Was this code for a principled refusal? We will never know.

Officially, Sindelar died accidentally of carbon monoxide poisoning in Vienna in 1939, but rumours have long swirled that he committed suicide or was murdered by the Nazis.

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6. Lily Parr (1905–78)

Stardom and the hardest shot

In the summer of 1915, competitive men’s football was suspended in the UK as the First World War raged on. This created an opportunity for the women’s game, and teams such as Dick, Kerr Ladies, founded in 1917. That team’s greatest player was Lily Parr, a winger who ate voraciously, chain-smoked Woodbines and reportedly had a shot harder than any man.

Post-1918, the women’s game attracted huge crowds: in 1920, no fewer than 53,000 showed up at Everton’s Goodison Park to watch Dick, Kerr Ladies take on St Helens. Alarmed, the Football Association (FA) banned women from playing at its members’ grounds, holding back the women’s game for decades. As for Parr, she scored close to 1,000 goals and, despite the FA’s efforts, played into her mid-forties.

7. Sir Stanley Matthews (1915–2000)

Enduring brilliance

Born during the First World War, Stanley Matthews didn’t retire from playing until he was 50. His final league game in the top flight came for Stoke City against Fulham on 6 February 1965.

Matthews, a winger so tricky he was dubbed ‘The Wizard of Dribble’, was the first footballer to be knighted while still playing and, in 1956, the first recipient of the Ballon d’Or. But he’s perhaps best remembered for the FA Cup final of 1953 – the so-called “Matthews Final”. With much of the nation cheering him on, he played brilliantly while helping Blackpool to a 4–3 win against Bolton Wanderers.

8. Bert Trautmann (1923–2013)

Adopted hero

Few players demonstrate the unifying potential of football as powerfully as goalkeeper Bert Trautmann. He arrived in the UK in 1945 as a prisoner of war and, as a volunteer paratrooper indoctrinated at a young age, was regarded as a Nazi.

In 1948, he was offered repatriation to Germany but instead decided to stay in England. After playing as an amateur with St Helens Town, he joined Manchester City. Following initial protests at the idea of a German ex-soldier playing for the club, Trautmann’s sheer brilliance won over fans. In the 1956 FA Cup final, unbeknown to Trautmann, he played part of the game with a broken neck.

9. Ferenc Puskás (1927–2006)

Football’s first superstar

On 25 November 1953, in the “Match of the Century”, Hungary spanked England 6–3 at Wembley. It was the first time England had lost at home to a team from continental Europe. But in May 1954 in Budapest, the carnage was even worse: England lost 7–1. Playing in a fluid 3-2-3-2 formation, the Hungarians befuddled and confounded the English.

Among England’s tormentors that day was Ferenc Puskás, who scored 84 goals in 85 international appearances for Hungary. Being abroad when the USSR quashed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, he chose to remain in exile and didn’t return to Hungary until 1981. Playing for Real Madrid in the 1960 European Cup final, he scored four goals in Los Blancos’ 7–3 defeat of Eintracht Frankfurt.

10. Jimmy Hill (1928–2015)

Renaissance man

For anyone who remembers Jimmy Hill as merely a chirpy TV personality with a prominent chin, a look back at his working life is instructive. As an inside forward, Hill turned out for both Brentford and Fulham. In 1957, he became chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association and was instrumental in campaigning to scrap the Football League’s £20 per week maximum wage limit.

As a manager in the 1960s, he took unfashionable Coventry City from the old Third Division into the top tier of the English league. Subsequently, he became a respected broadcaster and Coventry’s chairman. Setting the template for Franz Beckenbauer and Michel Platini, Hill didn’t content himself with any one role but built a wide-ranging career in football.

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11. Garrincha (1933–83)

Joyful and triumphant

A few years older than Pelé, winger Garrincha twice won the World Cup with Brazil. He is reputed to have been the first player to inspire choruses of “olé!” from crowds enthralled by his ability to make fools of opposition defenders.

Garrincha first came to global attention at the World Cup held in Sweden in 1958. There he embodied the attacking exuberance of Brazilian football, which seemed so exotic and magical to so many in a world where people couldn’t, as today, routinely access games in foreign leagues. “He had a childish spirit,” observed his teammate, Djalma Santos. “Garrincha was football’s answer to Charlie Chaplin.”

12. Pelé (1940–2022)

The greatest of all time

How good was Pelé? “The greatest player in history was [Alfredo] Di Stéfano,” reflected Real Madrid’s Ferenc Puskás. “I refuse to classify Pelé as a player. He was above that.” Twice a World Cup winner on the field (he missed the 1962 final through injury), he has come to embody sporting excellence.

Pelé’s life also reveals much about how politics and football intersect. In 1970, Brazil’s authoritarian military regime used the country’s World Cup triumph for propaganda purposes. Ironically, for the rest of the world, Pelé and his teammates represented freedom. Joining New York Cosmos in 1975, Pelé was key to helping Americans understand the beauty of the beautiful game.

13. Bobby Moore (1941–93)

Cultured and elegant

In 1966, as he walked up to receive the Jules Rimet trophy from Queen Elizabeth II following England’s 4–2 victory over West Germany in the World Cup final, Bobby Moore paused to wipe mud and sweat off his hands. Even in a day packed with images that have passed into English football folklore, it was a telling moment.

A skilful centre-back, Moore was always calm and classy. He also represents, along with the rest of the boys of the summer of 1966, a lost innocence. A sentimental idea? Perhaps – but the morning after the World Cup final, hat-trick hero and Moore’s club mate at West Ham United, Geoff Hurst, was spotted mowing his lawn in suburban Hornchurch, Essex.

14. Eusébio (1942–2014)

Dual identity

Born in Portuguese East Africa – now Mozambique – Eusébio joined Benfica as a teenager in 1960. The ‘Black Panther’ became the Lisbon club’s greatest player – a Ballon d’Or winner (1965), leading scorer at the 1966 World Cup, and a European Cup winner who scored twice as Benfica beat Real Madrid 5–3 in the 1962 final.

His career is also fascinating in how it represented conflicting identities. Under the Portuguese dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, Eusébio’s prowess was cited as evidence of the success of Lusotropicalismo – the myth that Portugal’s colonies were somehow harmonious.

Eusébio, who grew up kicking footballs made of socks stuffed with newspapers, rarely commented on political matters, yet became a symbol of anti-colonial liberation. Paradoxically, his remains lie in Portugal’s National Pantheon.

15. George Best (1946–2005)

Wasted talent

Dubbed O Quinto Beatle (the fifth Beatle) by the Portuguese press for his mop-top hair, Belfast-born George Best – a winger of prodigious talent – enjoyed a level of fame unprecedented in English football in the 1960s. Sadly, having scored one of the goals that led Manchester United to victory in the 1968 European Cup final, an increasingly erratic Best succumbed to alcoholism.

Following a liver transplant in 2002, he continued to drink. He often made light of his addiction but, suffering from jaundice, insisted that the News of the World publish a deathbed photograph as a warning. Efforts to protect today’s young stars are rooted in the tragedy of Best’s decline.

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16. Johan Cruyff (1947–2016)

Total footballer

If there’s one moment that encapsulates why Johan Cruyff was so beloved, it came at the 1974 World Cup. Marked tightly by Sweden’s Jan Olsson, he feinted, as if about to kick the ball back down the pitch – but instead drew it back behind his standing foot, spun and left Olsson flailing. The Cruyff turn entered football’s lexicon.

Cruyff was endlessly cool – the man who made The Netherlands’ brand of total football tick, as players seamlessly switched positions. A three-time Ballon d’Or winner, and a star for both Ajax and Barcelona, Cruyff’s influence endures. As Barcelona manager, he developed an attacking possession game. One of those he most trusted to carry out his instructions on the field was the young Catalan midfielder Pep Guardiola – today, the second-most successful manager in football history.

17. Viv Anderson (b1956)

The first – and third – man

In November 1978, Nottingham Forest right-back Viv Anderson took to the field for England in a friendly against Czechoslovakia. He was just the third non-white footballer to represent his nation, after Frank Soo (partly of Chinese heritage and whose caps were unofficial because he represented his country during the Second World War) and the mixed-heritage Paul Reaney of Leeds United.

Though England’s manager, Ron Greenwood, played down the importance of Anderson’s appearance, it came at a time when fans all too often directed racist abuse at black players. Anderson twice won the European Cup with Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest.

18. Diego Maradona (1960–2020)

Magic from the streets

Only a very few footballers come to embody something about their nation’s psyche. Diego Maradona was arguably the greatest of these. Raised in Villa Fiorito, a Buenos Aires shantytown, he made his professional debut aged just 15. From the off, he had a magical ability to bring a football under his control. He was also streetwise, and came to represent the battling qualities of Argentina’s working-class hustlers and underdogs.

In 1986, he led Argentina to World Cup glory. A quarter-final against England encompassed both Maradona’s trickster qualities – he scored his first goal with a blatant handball – and his brilliance, when he dribbled through five players in the English defence to net a magnificent individual effort. Later, he battled personal demons but died a national hero.

19. Justin Fashanu (1961–98)

Pride and prejudice

In 1990, in an interview with The Sun, Justin Fashanu became the first professional footballer to come out as gay. A centre-forward hitherto best known as the first black player to command a £1m fee when he moved from Norwich City to Nottingham Forest, he reached a whole new level of fame. But this wasn’t adulation. Fans routinely taunted Fashanu, who later told Gay Times that his career suffered “heavy damage”.

His life ended sadly. In 1998, after being accused by a 17-year-old of sexual assault in Ellicott City, Maryland, Fashanu left the US for England. Fearing that he wouldn’t get a fair trial, and claiming the encounter was consensual, he hanged himself in London.

20. Jean-Marc Bosman (b1964)

Legal eagle

In 1990, 25-year-old Jean-Marc Bosman wanted to move from RFC Liège in Belgium to play for Dunkerque, across the border in France. A former under-21 international at the end of his contract, the Belgian midfielder needed a fresh start. But the transfer was blocked by Liège, who demanded a fee of around £500,000, paid in full and up front. The move stalled, and Liège cut Bosman’s wages by 75%.

In response, Bosman went to the courts, arguing that Liège had breached his rights under the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which allowed freedom of movement within the European Community. In 1995, the European Court of Justice ruled in Bosman’s favour, leaving footballers free to run down their contracts without the risk of being prevented from moving on.

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21. George Weah (b1966)

National leader

In 2003, aged 37, Liberian striker George Weah hung up his boots after a glittering career. The first – and so far only – African player to win the Ballon d’Or (1995), he played for such European giants as Paris Saint-Germain, AC Milan and Chelsea, winning trophies with all three. However, perhaps because he’d been born in a country beset by conflict, he always looked up from the pitch.

Weah became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador while still a player. He worked on youth programmes to bring football academies to emerging nations. After retiring from playing, Weah went into politics, and served as president of his nation from 2018–24.

22. Mia Hamm (b1972)

Growing the game

While women’s football in Europe was held back by a combination of sexism and the dominance of the men’s game, the development of – if we must – soccer in the US proceeded down a different path. Initially, soccer moms were far more likely to be ferrying their daughters to practice than their sons.

It’s no coincidence that the US women’s national soccer team has won the World Cup four times. Mia Hamm was the team’s first true star – a two-time World Cup winner who scored 158 goals in 276 international appearances. In 2013, she became the first woman to be inducted into the international World Football Hall of Fame.

23. Sir David Beckham (b1975)

Commanding the attention economy

We live in an era when Ronaldo and Messi are global brands. But it was an English player who truly anticipated this brave new world of celebrity. In a match against Wimbledon in August 1996, Manchester United winger David Beckham spotted opposition goalie Neil Sullivan off his line – and lobbed the hapless keeper from 52 metres out. Beckham-mania was set to launch.

The photogenic midfielder’s place in the global spotlight was cemented by his 1999 marriage to ‘Posh Spice’ Victoria. Despite some PR missteps, brand Beckham – powered by a glittering career that brought a Champions League winners medal and 115 England caps – powers on. He is now co-owner of US top-tier team Inter Miami, whose star player is Lionel Messi.

24. Didier Drogba (b1978)

Bruiser and peacenik

As a player, Didier Drogba was a muscular centre-forward. He spent the best years of his career at Chelsea, scoring the winning penalty in a shootout in the European Champions’ League final against Bayern Munich in 2012.

Born in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, Drogba is a revered figure in his homeland, a former captain of the national team who was twice named African Footballer of the Year. In 2005, the Ivory Coast – then engulfed by civil war – qualified for the World Cup finals for the first time. Drogba immediately appealed for an end to violence, speaking to camera from the team’s dressing room. A ceasefire ensued.

25. Megan Rapinoe (b1985)

Player and activist

In an era when celebrities routinely big up their activism, Megan Rapinoe stands out for genuinely acting on her principles. In September 2016, she took the knee before a league game during the playing of the US national anthem – a gesture of solidarity with National Football League player Colin Kaepernick, who had done the same as a protest against racial injustice.

“Being a gay American, I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties,” she noted. Rapinoe has advocated for the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, and campaigned for equal pay for female and male players in US national teams. Such activism doesn’t overshadow her brilliance on the field: she twice won the World Cup, in 2015 and 2019.

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26. Marcus Rashford (b1997)

Food for thought

Footballers are often warned of the dangers of getting involved in politics. But today’s players are far more likely to speak their minds – as Marcus Rashford proved during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Having been involved in a 2019 campaign to help homeless people, Rashford teamed up with charity FareShare to ensure that children in Greater Manchester who would usually receive free school meals continued to be fed during lockdowns. In June 2020, he wrote an open letter to Boris Johnson’s government calling for the end of child poverty.

Within a day, the government announced that it would spend £120m on a “Covid summer food fund” for children. Rashford’s campaigning reflects his upbringing: his single mother worked multiple jobs and skipped meals to raise him during his childhood.

27. Chloe Kelly (b1998)

England’s glory

In 2022, England beat Germany 2–1 at Wembley to become European champions for the first time. An enduring image of the Euros final is of substitute Chloe Kelly’s enthusiastic celebration after scoring the game’s winning goal during extra time.

Kelly’s celebration has become synonymous with female empowerment – the joy of a ‘lioness’. Her reaction won the approval of US international Brandi Chastain, who reacted similarly after scoring the crucial penalty in a shootout at the 1999 World Cup final. Kelly, a Champions League winner with Arsenal in May 2025, also scored the decisive penalty as England retained their European title following a shootout against Spain later that summer.

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