Behind the Times

Shipwrecks are an easily overlooked material legacy of the Second World War, but they are rising to the surface as diplomatic issues.

Interrail gave young Europeans the freedom of the continent in the 1970s. Five decades on, people are still taking the train.

Under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, public ceremonies honouring the eternal life of Italy’s far-right dead have grown larger. 

Ireland’s experience of partition informed the attitudes of people across the island towards British plans for Palestine. Today it informs sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Forty years of opening and reform persuaded a lot of people that the Chinese are not really communists. But modern China was modelled on the USSR, and its leaders want to revert to their Leninist roots.

Columbine marked the beginning of a new era of high-profile mass shootings in the US. Was the attack the inevitable outcome of lax controls and a culture of gun glorification?

Reforms to divorce law inevitably prompt moral panic as they did in Victorian England. It has not yet proven to be justified.

ASEAN was founded to promote peace between the nations of Southeast Asia. Incapable of moving with the times, what is the point of it?

In January 1944 the Daily Mail became the first transoceanic newspaper, having transformed the relationship between politics, the press and the people. How powerful is it really?

The British Council was founded to help the world better understand Britain and to fight fascism. As times changed, so did its remit.