John Thelwall was born in 1764 in Covent Garden, London. The son of a silk mercer, he was unsuccessfully apprenticed to his father after leaving school at 13, and then successively, an apprenticed tailor, and an articled legal clerk; but he failed to impress at any of these, apparently reading during working hours. Turning to his pen, he published two volumes of poems and became literary editor of the Biographical and Imperial Magazine. Speaking at the Coachmakers' Hall, he caught the attention of John Home Tooke, who offered to send him to university. But by this time he was already enthusing about the revolution in France and had joined both the whiggish Society of the Friends of the People, and the more down-market London Corresponding Society. In the midst of all of this, and getting married, he attended some courses on anatomy and medicine at one of the London medical colleges.

In contrast to the innumerable studies of the revolutionary movement in risorgimento Italy, the popular counter-revolutionary movement has received scant attention from historians. Reasons for this neglect are not hard to find: distaste for what is perceived as a retrograde movement on behalf of a deservedly lost cause reinforces the normal tendency of historians to concentrate on the ‘winners’ rather than the ‘losers’ who by their very nature seem of less significance. That the Italian popular counter-revolution, was among the losers of history is undeniable: it did not succeed in its own time, nor did it contribute to any of the great progressive movements that transformed European society over the next century. Nonetheless, this neglect seems unjustified. To ignore a movement that had the support of a sizeable part of the Italian people – indeed, greater support at times than the risorgimento itself, which few historians would deny was the work of a small elite – can only result in a very distorted picture of nineteenth-century Italy. Moreover, to understand the development of a complex historical event such as the risorgimento, it is not sufficient to study only the winners, for the nature and weaknesses of the losers may also have played a major role in determining the outcome. This raises a fundamental question concerning the Italian counter-revolution: enjoying as it did wide popular support, why did it accomplish so little? It had its moments of triumph, but in general its record was unimpressive. Why did not this reservoir of popular support give conservatives the upper hand and abort the risorgimento? Why, in particular, did conservative governments make so little use of this apparently potent ally?

The issue of sweated labour formed one of the most intractable social problems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Numerous remedies to solve sweating, such as the restriction of female and child labour, the abolition of domestic workshops, consumers' leagues, and co-operative production were variously advanced but subsequently found to be wanting. Eventually, and bowing to the inevitable, Edwardians finally sanctioned one cautious measure which they thought would curb sweating at its root – that is the legal control of low pay in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. Initially, the act applied to domestic chain-making, ready-made and wholesale bespoke tailoring, paper-box making, and the machine-made lace and finishing trade. In these four industries in which wages were deemed unduly low, boards were established consisting of equal numbers of employers' and workers' representatives, plus independent members nominated by the state. In effect, the boards were thus a form of compulsory arbitration on pay.

The First World War was launched in the belief that force could be an effective instrument of policy. Underlying the decisions of July and August 1914 was a hard core of calculation, based on the advice to governments that the fighting would be fierce but short, and that its political and economic repercussions could be contained. In addition, because the two sides were closer to military equivalence than in previous crises, both could believe that they had a reasonable prospect of victory. But such equivalence, given the weapons technology of the day, might also deny either coalition a speedy, surgical triumph. And it is from the prolongation of the war as well as its inception – from its not being over by Christmas – that its historical importance derives. Among the consequences were eight million dead, and the dislocation of the Western economic system. Without the war it is unlikely that either Lenin, or Mussolini, or even Hitler, would have come to office. As far as such things can be said with certainty, the First World War was a precondition of the Second. A four-month rather than a four-year conflagration would have had other, now unknowable, consequences. It would not, presumably, have had these.

Gambling has received surprisingly little attention from social historians, especially considering the wide growth of interest in working-class leisure over the last decade. The leading historians in this field, including Peter Bailey, Hugh Cunningham and Stephen Jones, have been more concerned with the development of institutional forms of leisure such as the music-hall and the cinema. In the only detailed study of gambling, Ross McKibbin considered the growth of betting on horse racing and the football pools between 1880 and 1939, claiming that gambling constituted a rational pursuit within the economic and intellectual environment of working-class life. McKibbin's pioneering article established that betting was a central feature of working-class leisure, and in a case study of Salford I propose to develop this argument by looking at a wider range of forms of gambling, and by an examination of the survival of betting as an illegal activity. McKibbin dealt only briefly with the question of the policing of gambling. I propose to relate some of the findings of my research to a second concern of recent social history, the impact of policing upon popular recreation.

Given the vast amount of literature that has been published about bomber command's role during the Second World War, it might seem, at first sight, that there was not much to add. The magisterial volumes of the official history written by Sir Charles Webster and Dr Noble Frankland appear to have said all there is to say; and to them must now be added numerous books which they have helped to engender, such as – to mention but the most recent two – those of John Terraine and Max Hastings.