Conjectures of Brumer, Gross and Stark

We give an introduction to generalisations of conjectures of Brumer and Stark on the annihilator of the class group of a number field. We review the relation to the equivariant Tamagawa number conjecture, the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory for totally real fields, and a conjecture of Gross on the behaviour of $p$-adic Artin $L$-functions at zero.