The author and politician Morgan Philips Price (1885–1976) is best remembered today as a sympathetic eye-witness to the Russian Revolution and commentator on events in Soviet Russia throughout his long life. Less well known are his activities in Germany, to which he travelled in 1918 to observe the course of the November Revolution and better communicate his favourable view of Bolshevik Russia to Western Europe, and where he remained until 1924. In the summer of 1919, Price was arrested and held without trial in Berlin's Moabit prison, an incident which he later insisted was instigated by the British authorities. This article examines the extensive files on Price kept by the British security services in order to verify this interpretation of his arrest. In so doing, it will argue that a consideration of the case not only sheds light on an interesting aspect of Price's biography but also reveals much about the prevailing mind-set amongst some leading British military officers, security personnel, and politicians, and the methods by which they sought to neutralize perceived ‘revolutionary’ threats in the months after the First World War.

The military triumphs and the political eclipse of Marlborough epitomize much of the history of the Treaty of Utrecht. He was, as even Bolingbroke acknowledged, the great successor to William, keeping the Grand Alliance together and imparting to it a rapid and vigorous motion in sharp contrast to the delays of William's ‘languishing out disastrous campaigns’. As ‘the greatest general, and as the greatest minister, that our country or perhaps any other has produced’ (to quote Bolingbroke again), he was deeply involved in the prolonged negotiations leading to the peace. But Marlborough and the Whigs were discredited and ousted from office in the course of the negotiations, and the peace was the work of a Tory ministry which claimed that the terms showed a reaction from the impracticable proposals of the Whigs to the more sound, statesmanlike and feasible, concepts of William III.

In the spring and summer of 1942 the German military forces in north Africa and southern Russia made significant advances. In June the German army reached EI Alamein, only seventy miles west of Alexandria, while in August the German army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. As a result of these German advances, Britain, which was the allied country with primary responsibility for defending the Middle East against the Axis powers, became concerned about the possibility that the German air force might attempt to bomb the oilfields and oil refineries in the Middle East in order to deny the oil in that area to the allied governments. Britain was also alarmed about the possibility that, instead of bombing the oil installations, the Germans might attempt to capture them intact in order to utilize the oil for their war machine. In 1942 total Middle Eastern oil production constituted only about six per cent of total world oil production. However, all Middle Eastern oil was refined locally - about two-thirds at Abadan in Iran - and played a vital role in the conduct of British military operations in the Middle East and southeast Asia.1 In 1942 Britain had troops stationed in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Bahrain, the four main Middle Eastern oil-producing nations, and thus was well placed to defend and, if necessary, to destroy the oil facilities in those countries. However, at this time Sa'udi Arabia, the remaining Middle Eastern oil producing nation, was a neutral power with no British or American troops stationed on its territory. As a result of Sa'udi neutrality it was difficult for Britain to defend the Sa'udi oilfields against German air attack. It was also difficult for Britain to make the necessary preparations to destroy the Sa'udi oilfields in the event that the German army advanced into the Arabian peninsula. The purpose of this communication will be to discuss the manner in which the British government attempted to deal with these problems. It will also discuss the reaction of the United States government and the American-owned oil company in Sa'udi Arabia to this situation.

The resignation in May 1730 of Charles, second Viscount Townshend (1674–1738), as Secretary of State for the Northern Department, is an event that has attracted little attention. Aware of Sir Robert Walpole's determination to get rid of Townshend, scholars have tended to treat Walpole's success as inevitable. The major study of British political history in these years, that contained within Professor Plumb's valuable biography of Walpole, is disappointingly brief in its treatment of the crisis. This reflects the general tendency of the work to concentrate on domestic politics and to devote less attention to the interrelationship between them and foreign policy. As a result Plumb's treatment of Townshend's departure is less probing and comprehensive than most of his book. The failure of scholars to study the ministerial crisis of 1729–30is far from exceptional, for the years of Walpole's ascendancy have escaped the same degree of scrutiny by political historians that has marked the reigns of Anne and George III. A host of major figures lack scholarly biographies: George II; William Stanhope, who succeeded Townshend and was ennobled as Lord Harrington in 1730; the earl of Chesterfield, Townshend's principal supporter in the ministry in 1729–30; William Pulteney, the leader of the opposition Whigs; Lord Wilmington, the duke of Dorset and George Dodington, ministerial opponents of Walpole; and Queen Caroline.

In 1648, Essex was the scene of a major military campaign of the Second Civil War. This essay seeks to explain why that campaign was fought. There are several reasons why such an investigation is worthwhile. Firstly, it challenges the fashionable historical idea that the Civil Wars were fundamentally a conflict between centre and localities. Secondly, it concentrates upon the Second Civil War as a serious proposition, not as a pathetic appendage of the earlier conflict to be dismissed with contempt but not consideration. Thirdly, it demands a look at Essex as a county caught up in the violence of civil war.

Recently several works have illuminated the important role played by diplomats in the course of the religious wars of the latter half of the sixteenth century. We propose to shed some additional light on this general subject by studying the often curious activities of some Spanish envoys to France and England with respect to Spanish Protestants who had taken refuge in those lands. Through a careful scrutiny of related but seemingly minor matters we can frequently learn more about major ones.

In the great and widespread revival of medieval studies by which the nineteenth century was distinguished, no province was so long neglected as that of academic institutions and scholastic thought. The pioneers of the historical revival were, almost without exception, men deeply influenced by the romantic movement, and many of them were antiquaries rather than historians; their successors, especially in England and Germany, were principally concerned to trace in the Middle Ages the origins of national institutions and racial characteristics; to neither party did the speculations of what seemed an outworn religious organization make any appeal. Even those scholars who, in France and elsewhere, were themselves Catholics and ecclesiastics, were also men who had been brought up in an age of transition and adaptation, when traditional religion was on the defensive, and were often more sympathetic towards the various systems of philosophy—idealist or ontological—that flowered and fell in Germany and north Italy in the period after the French Revolution. Meanwhile, in the century before that great cataclysm, the scholastic thought of the thirteenth century, rejuvenated by the Italian and Spanish theologians of the counter-Reformation, had been all but submerged by successive waves of Jansenism, rationalism and the new philosophy of Kant, and had only survived in a few schools as a dry and formal discipline. To all alike, therefore, whether Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans or free-thinkers, the vast mass of manuscript material which survived from the scholastic period to cumber the libraries appeared destitute of literary or human interest, and daunted the boldest with its bulk and its technical terminology.

The conservative tradition in America. By Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996. Pp. ix+199. ISBN 0-8476-8167-X. $14.95.

Hoods and shirts: the extreme right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. By Philip Jenkins. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-8078-2316-3. $29.95.

From demagogue to Dixiecrat: Horace Wilkinson and the politics of race. By Glenn Feldman. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1995. Pp. xviii+311. ISBN 0-8191-9783-1. $32.50.

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: race in the conservative counterrevolution, 1963–1994. By Dan T. Carter. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+134. ISBN 0-8071-2118-5. £21.95.

According to political scientists Charles W. Dunn and David Woodward in The conservative tradition in America, the dramatic Republican gains in the 1994 elections exemplified the eclilse of New Deal liberalism by a resurgent conservatism, a politcal shift that began in the late 1960s and which Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 fortified. In their short survey the authors investigate the intellectual roots of modern conservatism and attempt to define and explain the recent manifestation of this heritage. The three other recent works reviewed here provide a larger historical context, which Dunn and Woodward ignore, for understanding conservatism and right extremism in America.

The 1890s can easily be portrayed as the era of missed opportunities in Anglo-German relations. Before the Kruger telegram, the Boer War, the Boxer rebellion and the Berlin to Bagdad railway, and most particularly before the naval race, it seems possible that Britain and Germany might have drawn closer together and that areas of mutual interest might have led to co-operation rather than antagonism. The failure to draw together in the 1890s, it can be argued, precipitated the series of disputes that progressively embittered Anglo-German relations. If only an understanding had been reached before each side became convinced of the other's enmity, if only men on both sides had been more reasonable, more judicious, more temperate, perhaps Europe could have avoided the division into armed camps, and perhaps the cataclysm of 1914 could have been averted.

It is surprising that while there is a considerable literature dealing with the reform of the civil service from the time of Burke to the setting up of the Civil Service Commission in 1855, very little attention has been paid to the final stages of reform following the introduction of open competition in 1870. Yet it was in this period that patronage ceased to be of importance and the modern civil service developed. The Order in Council of 4 June 1870 which made open competition the normal method of entry to the civil service enormously reduced the scope of patronage, but it did not kill it immediately. Right up to the First World War remnants of the old system lingered in most departments, although by then a lavish system of honours and subsidies from the party funds had displaced the most objectionable forms of political patronage. The purpose of this article is to give some indication