The partial opening up of the formerly closed Soviet archives has had an enormous impact on the amount of new historical material available for research. Recent developments in research on Stalin and the Soviet Union are remarkable. The present article examines these developments with respect to three particular topics: ‘Stalin and Terror’, ‘Stalin and ideology’, and ‘Stalin and society’. It argues that whereas in certain areas new information has led to a greater consensus among historians, in others, such as Stalin's Great Terror, it has led to heated controversy. The article asks why, and suggests that the problem lies both in conceptualization and in the use of historical sources. More generally, the article discusses the present state of knowledge in the field. Because the study of Stalinism is often assessed in the light of the study of Nazism, it includes brief comparisons of Stalin and Hitler and Stalinism and Nazism where appropriate.

This article examines the French response to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany in January of 1933. It argues that French intelligence warned civilian and military leaders that the priorities of the new regime were rearmament and the militarization of German society in preparation for a war of conquest. This essentially accurate appreciation of the situation inside Germany had little impact on the course of French foreign policy. At this juncture French society was preoccupied with worsening economic crisis and pacifist sentiment had reached its inter-war zenith. The national focus was inward and domestic concerns took priority over the external threat from Germany. Finally, France was in a position of relative isolation and could garner no support for a policy of firmness from its erstwhile allies, Great Britain and the United States. This combination of national introspection and diplomatic isolation deterred a succession of governments from taking determined steps to meet the Nazi challenge in 1933.

In his recent book, French war aims against Germany, 1914–1919, David Stevenson comes to the heart of the problem relative to the diplomatic prolongation of World War I. ‘No Government’, he asserts, ‘was willing to jettison its war aims in the interest of a compromise peace, or to place itself at the enemy's mercy while a chance of victory remained’. His work is to be applauded, therefore, for he has given us the first succinct and judicious account of the course of official French war aims from 1916 to 1919, enlarging upon a topic heretofore treated in scholarly articles. Using the wealth of archival documentation now available, and the private papers of numerous participants, Stevenson has made a major and much-needed contribution to our knowledge of the subject by tracing the relationship between official war aims policy, peace diplomacy and the diplomatic impact of allied policy on French war aims from their inception to the Versailles settlement.

The years immediately after the Glorious Revolution saw the Irish parliament establish itself as an active legislative body. Local government in the country then received something of a fillip, both through legislative action in Dublin, and by reason of the extended period of social and political stability that followed the end of Queen Anne's reign. This essay seeks to outline the responsibilities and functions of the grand jury in Ireland, and thus to establish its position as perhaps the most important component in the governance of provincial Ireland. Further to this it attempts to analyse the social composition of juries through a study of the methods of selection, and the attendant qualification criteria. The available evidence suggests that despite its extensive power and influence, membership of the grand jury was not completely monopolized by the land-owning Anglican elite. Rather, service on the grand jury reached some way down the social scale, and could be undertaken by men from outside the established church. Over time, however, jurors came to be selected from a diminishing pool of candidates : a practice which led to the creation of a largely homogeneous local administrative elite.

This review furthers our understanding of the history of neo-liberalism in Britain, and more particularly of the economics and politics of the 1970s and 1980s, through an examination of the writings of the economic journalist, Samuel Brittan, widely regarded as a central figure in undermining the intellectual basis for the Keynesian consensus about big government. This review provides a close study of Brittan's ‘The economic contradictions of democracy’ (1975, hereafter ECD) – one of the most cited contributions to the declinist literature of the decade – in which Brittan warned that, without remedial action, liberal democracy ‘is likely to pass away within the lifetime of people now adult’. In this reappraisal of Brittan's ECD, it is argued that this paper is much more than just eloquent, scholarly declinism, and in the process, the generic problem facing all contemporary historians of thought and policy is confronted: what is the influence of any one individual and/or work? The reappraisal relates directly to central themes of the 1970s ‘crisis’, especially ‘overload’ and ‘ungovernability’; it examines the competitive nature of the market for declinist prognostications (notably the Jay–Brittan nexus), with one objective being to provide a counterbalance to much recent scholarship which has over-focused on think-tanks at the expense of elite journalists who were very far from being academics manqués; and, finally, it reviews Brittan's role in the so-called Thatcher revolution, where much has been claimed but little documented.

Contrary to the widespread assumption that in imperial Germany urban affairs were conducted by a homogeneous ‘unpolitical’ notable elite until around 1900, a review of recently published case studies suggests that politics had entered local government by the 1870s. Frequent causes for the politicization of local affairs included confessional divisions, territorial change, or simply the wish of local elites to buttress their own positions. The ways in which liberals in particular took advantage of this emergence of political discourse at the urban level is highlighted by the case of Frankfurt am Main. The city's three liberal parties developed in competition with each other. Each managed to address and articulate the citizens' peculiar grievances with differing degrees of success. By 1880, public life inside and outside the town hall was conducted according to political ground rules, and this was accepted by every party. Against the still prevailing view of a rigid liberalism which after 1874 was in evident terminal decline, the decade after 1866 needs to be recognized as the period in which liberals took charge of municipal government across most of Germany, through the politicization of often highly individual local concerns with astonishing sophistication and flexibility.

Sex, populism, and the search for universal religious freedom were the overwhelming preoccupations of Russia's Silver Age, and no churchman did more to engage with them than Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov). Having spearheaded the Russian Orthodox church's mission to the intelligentsia in the years before 1905, he fell from grace when Russian social Christianity was irrevocably politicized by revolution. Sacked from his chair at the St Petersburg theological academy when he declared himself a Christian socialist, he was unfrocked for converting to the Old Belief, and imprisoned for fomenting sedition. Yet even as he lurched from the established church, via the schism, to a revolutionary form of Golgothan Christianity, obsessed with suffering, Mikhail never abandoned his burning desire to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. His career, which has so far escaped detailed historical investigation, encapsulates most of the ecclesiastical tensions of his time, and reveals in particularly acute form the difficulties experienced by the Russian church when it attempted to respond to modernist intellectuals and to popular spiritual need.

The British wrote and read a large quantity of fictional depictions of future wars and invasions in the period between 1871 and 1914, imagining the various ways in which a great war might look before the real conflict broke out. This article outlines the ways in which this form of literature described a British world united across time and space. The stories have traditionally been read as indicative of a societal fear of invasion, of imperial decline, or of the dangers of revolutionary upheaval. The article argues that the stories’ popularity can instead be traced to the way they included their readers in the experience of invasion and conflict, and how they were well suited to the era of modern mass newspapers. The article therefore concludes that earlier interpretations of how readers engaged with such fiction has underestimated how a varied readership could view the stories as entertaining spectacles where they were invited to participate. As such, the article offers a new interpretation of an important literary genre as well as of British pre-war political culture.

In the 1950s the Democratic Party in California grew from a struggling, rump organization into the major political party in the state. This was in large part due to the activities of a network of liberal activists in the California Democratic Council, a group formed in 1953 to encourage the creation of local Democratic ‘clubs’ across California in which those interested in left-of-centre politics could debate issues of the day and campaign for Democratic candidates in elections. This article argues that the rise of the Democrats in the Golden State was predicated on the espousal by both amateur activists and party politicians of an explicitly social democratic ideology that provided a bridge between the policies of the New Deal in the 1930s and the more ambitious goals of the Great Society at the national level in the 1960s. The article examines the ideas embraced by liberal politicians in the 1950s and looks at how those ideas underpinned a massive expansion of California's welfare state in the early 1960s.

About the circumstances surrounding Hobbes's dismissal from Charles's court and his subsequent departure from Paris at the end of 1651 we know little. While recent scholarship has clarified the broad outline of events, fresh evidence allows us to add some detail, showing that Leviathan was attacked in a sermon delivered by Richard Steward in the Anglican chapel of Sir Richard Browne, thus confirming Hobbes's claim for the involvement of the Anglican establishment in engineering his dismissal from court and giving us a slightly clearer sense of the source and character of the move against him.

This article is a response to an account of a communist espionage circle which appeared in this journal in 2003. It argues that the original article is seriously misleading because of its apparently exclusive reliance on previously classified intelligence documents and the interpretations found within them. Combined with a failure to provide an appropriate historical context, particularly concerning the politics of the drama's central figure – the Daily Herald journalist W. N. Ewer – and a tendency to import questionable value judgements into the narrative, the original piece substitutes the secret policeman's opinions for a real history of its subject-matter.

In the summer of 1920, as the I.R.A.'s guerrilla campaign against the Royal Irish Constabulary and the British Army approached its climax, the British government attempted to reinforce the R.I.C. by raising a force of ex-officers to act as a mobile police striking force. The new organization was called the Auxiliary Division of the R.I.C, and its members, though officially referred to as ‘cadets’, were popularly called Auxiliaries or Auxis, a denomination which suggests a kind of subconscious analogy with their I.R.A. opponents, who were generally known as ‘Volunteers’. In the subsequent mythology of the Irish ‘Troubles’ the Auxiliaries were generally lumped together with the ‘Black and Tans’ but were in fact a more elite body. The ‘Black and Tans’ were ex-servicemen recruited to serve as R.I.C. constables and initially kitted out in a motley of R.I.C. dark green and Army khaki. The Auxiliaries on the other hand were nattily dressed in tarn o'shanters, khaki tunics and puttees (or officer's gaiters) and were paid a pound a day — twice the R.I.C. constable's rate — which made them the most highly-paid uniformed force in the world at that time.1 Altogether only 2,214 were recruited (with perhaps two-thirds that number in service at the peak of the formation's strength), but they did more than their fair share to discredit the British regime in Ireland.

The 1939 White Paper remained the basis of British rule in Palestine during the first three years of war. The military crises that erupted in the Middle East between 1940 and 1942 did not permit consideration of any alternatives - if only because Britain could not be certain that in would still be in the area at the end of the war. Since his appointment to the War Cabinet in September 1939, Churchill had tried, in vain, to halt the implementation of the White Paper.

This article explores the activities of Nicolas Chesneau, a Parisian printer active between the beginning of the French Wars of Religion and the League. While printing in the Protestant sphere has received a great deal of historiographical attention, the influence of Catholic printing on opinion forming during the French Wars of Religion remains comparatively misunderstood. Nicolas Chesneau was a militant Catholic printer whose activity responded to commercial and political pressures but also reflects a personal commitment to Catholicism. Evidence drawn from Chesneau's epistles and bibliography reveals personal relationships with authors, other printers, and patrons. Chesneau's production answered growing demand for news and religious instruction for the laity, a phenomenon that is only beginning to be understood. Analysis of his output reveals the influence of the cardinal de Lorraine who was determined to use the vernacular book to pursue his agenda of reform, often in the face of institutional opposition from the crown, the parlement, and the University of Paris. The end of Nicolas Chesneau's career is marked by a shift towards expensive in-folio books that proved to be less profitable than the short in-octavo works that distinguishes his production during the first decade of the French Wars of Religion.