On 23 March 1815 Louis XVIII disbanded die French army. In June Napoleon lost Waterloo and abdicated, and the Bourbons returned to Paris to complete the destruction of the army. It had proved itself loyal only to Napoleon and over half of the 70,000 men of Davout's command preferred desertion to the white cockade. The country at large was hostile and in the royalist south returning officers were arrested and several were killed. In August the King published an ordinance ‘concerning the organization of a new army’. The army was ‘to be formed according to the principles which constitute a truly national army to form a military force in harmony with the liberal nature of our charter… avoiding the separation of die army from the interests of die country‘. It was not an easy task. Financial circumstances placed limitations on size, die Charter forbade conscription, the allies wanted reprisals and die royalists claimed rewards for their loyal service.

In the course of his challenging reassessment of the parliamentary politics of the early seventeenth century, Conrad Russell has suggested that modern students of the period have approached the subject with deep-seated preconceptions about the existence of fundamental conflicts between the crown and the house of commons. As a result, the willingness of the lower house to take up issues of parliamentary privilege has probably been over-rated. The explanation for this long-standing misapprehension lies in the fact that the views of those M.P.s who wished to pursue such issues have found their way into the record far more often than the silences of their colleagues who did not want to take them up.

One of the more absorbing events in the great drama of the Popish Plot, which swept through English political life in the autumn of 1678, was the discovery of the corpse of a Westminster magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, in a ditch near Primrose Hill on 17 October 1678. This event, which sparked off a great deal of panic in London and gained some notoriety at the time, has continued to perplex historians, both professional and amateur, ever since. The speculation as to how Godfrey met his death and who did the deed, has tended to obscure the fact that we still know surprisingly little about this prominent Westminster merchant and justice of the peace before his demise. Despite an intensive historical investigation of Godfrey's murder, if murder it was, a lack of evidence has always been the main problem for any historian attempting to analyse Godfrey's character and career prior to his death. This was compounded by the allegation that on the night before his disappearance Godfrey burnt a large number of his personal papers. However, located in the collections of the National Library of Ireland is a small white leather-backed volume containing seventeenth-century copies of the correspondence of Sir Edmund Godfrey to his close friend the Irish healer and stroker Valentine Greatrakes. This letterbook is a significant addition to the historical record in that it contains what may be the only surviving personal letters of the ‘murdered’ magistrate during the late 1660s and early 1670s.

Bob Smillie, a volunteer with the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) contingent in the Spanish Civil War, died while held prisoner by the Republican side in Valencia in June 1937. His death, officially due to appendicitis, has been consistently treated as suspicious, not least by his comrade-in-arms George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. This article re-examines the circumstances surrounding Smillie's death, using the papers of the I.L.P. businessman David Murray who was in Spain attempting to secure his release. Murray accepted the ‘official version’ of Smillie's death by natural causes – and defended it doggedly within I.L.P. circles – despite those who advanced views to the contrary. The article examines Murray's evidence in reaching his conclusions, and concludes that the I.L.P.'s response to Smillie's death reveals much about its precarious position within British politics in the late 1930s.

Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe. By Stuart Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+827. ISBN 0–19–820001–3. £75.00.

The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization. By Walter D. Mignolo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+426. ISBN 0–472–10327. $39.50.

Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in early modern Europe. By Lyndal Roper. London: Routledge, 1995. Pp. ix+254. ISBN 0–415–10581–1. £13.99.

As Professor Richard Evans's spirited In defence of history attests, postmodernism continues to arouse strong passions and suspicions among distinguished practitioners of the discipline. This is hardly surprising: in their most extreme and undiluted form, the theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and more particularly their many disciples, are stubbornly corrosive of the ethos and rationale of history as conventionally taught and written. To insist that the production of knowledge is inherently – indeed insidiously – political, and to claim that the veil of language which divides us from the past can never be pierced is to unsettle many traditional epistemological assumptions. And yet postmodernism and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ have posed timely and fundamental questions about truth, discourse, and objectivity which historians can ill afford to ignore. They have also helped to generate some of the most innovative and provocative historical writing in recent years. In different ways, each of the books under review engages with and reacts to the swirling debate about this influential and controversial body of ideas. All three make strenuous demands upon their readers; all three challenge us to reflect critically upon the methodologies we employ and the categories, concepts, polarities, and narrative paradigms to which we instinctively resort. Taken together they highlight both the potential strengths and weaknesses, the rewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study of witchcraft, sexuality, and colonization in early modern Europe and the New World.

Absolute monarchy and the Stuart constitution. By Glenn Burgess. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. ix+229. £25.00.

Henry Parker and the English civil war. By Michael Mendle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xix+204. £35.00.

Classical humanism and English political thought, 1550–1640. By Markku Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+356. £35.00.

Republicanism, liberty, and commercial society, 1649–1776. Ed. David Wootton. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. ix+497. £40.00.

This article outlines Richard Wagner's conception of music-drama during the period in which he formulated his intentions for composition of the epic Ring of the Nibelung. Attempting to renew rather than to restore the communal, political nature of Attic tragedy, he wished to transform that model from celebration of the Athenian political order into a savage critique of the contemporary political order, indeed into an incitement to and celebration of revolution. Wagner was determined to restore the dignity of art, a dignity he believed to have been lost in the pursuit of base, commercial considerations; but this determination should not be confused with the idea of art for art's sake. Instead, he wished to renew art in a socialist, even communist, sense as the paradigm of free, productive activity. The direct revolutionary experience of participation in the Dresden uprising of 1849 bolstered his conviction of the necessity of such a transformation. With his magnum opus, Wagner wrote, he intended to ‘make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’.

Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s. By I. Lukes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+318. ISBN 0-1951-0267-3. £22.50.

Carpatho–Ukraine in the twentieth century: a political and legal history. By V. Shandor. Cambridge, MA: distributed by Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1998. Pp. xvii+321. ISBN 0-9164A-5886-5. £21.95.

Czechoslovak national interests, Part I: A historical survey of Czechoslovak national interests, Part II: Reflections on the demise of Czechoslovak communism. By Oskar Krejčí. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Pp. 193, 167. ISBN 0-8803-3343-X. £31.00

For historians of empire, scandals provide a useful starting point for investigating how the operations of imperial power were contested and reworked in moments of crisis. Yet, existing scholarship on imperial scandal consists mostly of case-studies that do not always reflect on the larger trend of which they are a part. This review draws on six accounts of imperial scandals to produce a general picture of the characteristics and functions of scandals in the historiography of the nineteenth-century British empire. What this comparison suggests is that imperial scandals possessed distinctive stakes and seem, as a result, to have represented periodic ruptures in longer-term patterns of local silence and complicity. Scandals, if used cautiously, can therefore provide evidence to support ongoing discussions about the logic of colonial concealment. At the same time, scandals also remind us that publicity is not a simple cure-all. By including a wider range of actors and non-governmental sources, future studies of scandal might elucidate the political limits of transparency, as well as exploring how imperial subjects negotiated gendered and racialized access to public and political platforms.

This article compares the rhetorical justifications surrounding two landmark instances of Western imperialism. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt, ousting indigenous proto-nationalist forces that supposedly threatened British and other foreign interests. The consequences of this intervention were still being worked out in 1956 when, in the wake of the Cairo regime's nationalization of the Suez Canal, the British again invaded. France participated on this occasion, with serious but differing political consequences for both. We suggest that comparing how the British and French argued about these issues, and also examining how the rhetoric of the later crisis contrasted with the earlier one, offers useful insights into the two nations' respective imperial cultures. Specifically, we suggest that the latter-day imperialists Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet couched their actions in internationalist rhetoric reminiscent both of the Gladstone government's justifications for intervention in 1882 and of French official explanations for their takeover in Tunisia a year earlier. Each claimed their actions were taken both to uphold better standards of governance and to restore regional order, itself a highly loaded concept. The language of imperial domination was eschewed; but the ends of empire were served by the use of this rhetoric of ‘liberal order’.