Though both Russia and France appreciated the value of an alliance between the two countries, their predominant motives for concluding the Alliance were quite dissimilar. France seems to have been motivated mainly by fear of Germany. Her need for a strong military and political counterweight to Germany led her naturally to contemplate allying herself with Russia. Russia was primarily interested in obtaining investment capital to finance industrial development. Owing to a change of German policy in the late 1880s she was obliged to seek financial aid outside Berlin, hitherto her chief source of funds. France was apparently willing to lend Russia money in exchange for military and political support, which the Russians were not averse to providing. Hence the Alliance of 1891 was intended to be of benefit to both parties.

Sir Edward Grey entered the Foreign Office at a time when it was being rapidly transformed. A change in the registration system had freed the junior officials from most routine operations and encouraged the senior men to take a more active part in the actual formation of foreign policy. At the same time, a new group of men took over the most important departmental positions and entered the chief European embassies. For the most part, these men were far more conscious of German power than their predecessors and set the tone of British policy during the first years of Grey's Foreign Secretaryship. Charles Hardinge, Louis Mallet, William Tyrrell and Eyre Crowe in London, Francis Bertie, ambassador in Paris, Arthur Nicolson in St Petersburg and, after 1907, Goschen in Berlin were all to play important roles in shaping the new course.

This article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.

Surprisingly little attention has been given by modern historians to the composition or the detailed proceedings of the Convention Parliament of 1660. The generalizations of past generations of historians have been accepted and transmitted. In particular, terms of description have been applied to the political and religious groups in this parliament without precise definition or even verification. Since the demolition work performed by Professor Hexter, few would use the terms ‘presbyterian’ or ‘independent’ in talking of groups in the Long Parliament, at least without qualifications and additional definition. Yet they are still generally and confidently used in speaking of major groups in the Convention. So too is the label ‘royalist’, a quite useless term to use of 1660, when all but a few members wanted the return of the King, whatever their attitude had been in the 1640's. Yet these terms are still used as if ‘royalist’ and ‘presbyterian’ denoted separate and mutually exclusive groups. Some historians also see nothing illogical in contrasting ‘presbyterian’ (which if it means anything is a religious classification) with ‘royalist’ (a political term).

In the House of Commons on 23 May 1892, following a speech by Joseph Chamberlain in qualified support of Balfour's Irish Local Government Bill, Tim Healy assailed ‘our Birmingham Diogenes’ with considerable warmth for the manner in which such support was habitually rendered:

What happens is this. The Government bring in a Bill. Its proposals are attacked, and the Government gets into distress, and then of course ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’. The Rt.hon.Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham gets up and makes a speech. I have heard him make a speech on the Coercion Bill of 1887 in almost identical terms, and also on the Parnell Commission Bill of 1888.

In the period 1520–50 there was a large English community in the Veneto. This has traditionally been associated with the household of Reginald Pole, who is believed to have dispensed learning and patronage to those who went to the University of Padua in search of a continental education. However, an examination of both primary and secondary sources for the life of Pole suggests that he was only one of a number of reference points for young English scholars and travellers. Of equal, and perhaps greater, importance was the household of Edmund Harvell, a merchant who became English ambassador to the Republic. His household was philo-protestant in tone, and linked to Venetian dissenters and literary circles. These two central figures presented English scholars with the chance to experience the varying strands of Venetian political and religious philosophy at a time of great intellectual vitality. Men such as Richard Morison and Thomas Starkey returned home to write books about English government and society. When their work is set against the Venetian milieu of Harvell and Pole, we can gain a greater understanding of those Venetian influences which underpinned English political thought in the Tudor period and beyond.

Secret diplomacy is inevitable in wartime. I once heard Lord Grey denounce “secret treaties and bombing from the air”, as its two most evil effects. But between 1815 and 1914 England was only engaged in a major war for three years, and thus secret diplomacy had seldom the excuse pleaded by Grey. How far then is it inevitable in peace time? A careful examination of England's methods during this century, which ended in democracy, leads to some remarkable conclusions. Canning and Palmerston were less secretive than Gladstone, and Salisbury was infinitely less secretive than Lansdowne and Grey. Indeed it seems to be actually the case that our diplomacy became more secret as our constitution became more democratic. The purpose of this paper is to gather up the hints and traces of secret diplomacy, scattered through nearly a century of official papers. For, if these conclusions are to be established, it can only be by surveying long periods and estimating tendencies through several generations of diplomats.

When Joseph Chamberlain launched his striking tariff reform campaign in 1903 he was contributing to a very old debate. At the centre of the discussion had usually been the triangular relationship between free trade, protection and imperial unity. Were preferential tariffs compatible with British free trade? Was imperial preference necessary to maintain imperial unity? Could an empire divided against itself on tariff questions stand? Questions of that type became increasingly pertinent in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Entry for British exports into continental markets had become more difficult in the 'eighties, not only because of the tariff barriers which were more prominent but also because Britain found herself with few bargaining counters in the European tariff negotiations. The Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1860 had provided that neither party would, in its own country, subject the produce of the other party to higher duties than similar produce from other countries. This Most-Favoured-Nation clause had been the basis of a series of commercial treaties linking the European nations. The new network which arose in the ’eighties, covering Europe and the Americas, was negotiated largely without British intervention and the classification and rates were not designed to favour Britain. Britain sometimes even had difficulty in securing renewal of her M.F.N. agreements.

On 7 December 1916 David Lloyd George became prime minister, leading the second coalition government of the war. No archival sources of significance remain to be consulted to help explain how and why the particular composition of the new government emerged. A great deal has been written on the first years of the war, from many perspectives, but a satisfactory political history of Asquith's two administrations remains to be crafted. A sustained narrative, set in the appropriate context, which relates the political significance of the issues to the drama of politics, to the way individuals lose office and governments fall, which establishes trends, and measures cumulative effects is still unwritten.

Perhaps some justification is needed for yet another study on the literary background of the Easter 1916 Rising. Certainly the ‘high’ literature, represented by such writers as Yeats, AE, Synge and the three insurrection poet-fighters (Pearse, MacDonagh and Plunkett) has already been extensively analysed by a number of scholars. However, it is usually forgotten that numerous ‘popular’ authors were also writing in the forty years before 1916; authors who might be expected, if only by virtue of their numbers, to command a considerable readership. Names such as Joseph Campbell, Ethna Carberry, Nora Hopper, Seumas MacManus, Alice Milligan and Seumas O’Sullivan are unknown today except in occasional references by literary critics, yet these writers produced a great deal of verse on national topics, and were close to the general public and its preoccupations. Their work deserves the attention of historians; for only by identifying common ground between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ literature can one explore with any confidence the complex relationship between that literature as a whole and Irish society during this period. This I hope to do in the following pages.