In a major new history of British industrial relations, Alan Fox noted in 1985 that, ‘The Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act 1919 has so far received only the briefest of passing references in the texts, apparently on the supposition that its passage can be taken for granted. This understates its significance’. The Act, to which Fox himself devoted only two pages of his lengthy book, was passed after the cessation of the First World War. It declared as its aim the fulfilment of a wartime pledge made by the government to trade unions to reinstate in British factories those pre-war working practices which had been abandoned by Labour for the duration of the war, in order to expedite the output of munitions. These practices covered such matters as manning arrangements, closed shop agreements, restriction of overtime and apprenticeship rules.

In September 1579, at the height of an intense political debate over her prospective marriage to the duke of Anjou, Elizabeth I visited New Hall, the country seat of the match's greatest supporter within England, Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex. Her entertainment on that occasion, hitherto completely unknown, was described in a letter, printed here, from one Norfolk gentleman, Sir Edward Clere, to another, Bassingbourne Gawdy. The letter describes the dramatic performances and other entertainments provided for the queen, which included coded but unmistakeable encouragements for her to proceed with the marriage. This article discusses the ways in which this was done and their consequences for our knowledge of the Anjou marriage debate as a political episode, suggesting that Sussex sought to use the entertainment to boost the participation of more conservative members of the nobility in government. It also explores how this evidence affects our picture of Elizabethan courtly entertainments, and particularly their non-dramatic elements. Finally, it discusses Clere's letter itself as an insight into the nature of gentry news culture, particularly with regard to matters of high politics.

In the first half of the twentieth century, parole in the Deep South of the United States was part of a nexus of penal mechanisms providing white employers with a pliant black labour force. By contrast, in New York, which was at the forefront of innovations in parole policy, there was a surprising interracial consensus among white parole administrators and politicians, civil rights activists, and black prisoners themselves that the African American community was integral to parole administration and success. This article explores why different constituencies supported this consensus through debates on parole in the black press and via the desperate, and invariably futile, letters that prisoners wrote to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These sources also indicate that, for black prisoners in New York, African American influence over the parole system was routinely constrained by widespread black poverty, racial segregation, and discrimination in employment.

Apart from Italian fascism and German National-Socialism – the most famous fascisms of the interwar era – considerable research has been conducted during the past two decades about generic fascism: fascist groups, movements, and parties in other countries. In Israel, while the Revisionist Zionist movement has been continually accused by its political rivals of being fascist, these accusations have not yet been examined according to any comparative model of fascism. Relying on Robert Paxton's model of generic fascism, this article examines how one of its components – the drive for closer integration of the national community – was manifested in the writings of seven Revisionist activists in mandatory Palestine: Itamar Ben Avi, Abba Aḥime'ir, U. Z. Grünberg, Joshua Yevin, Wolfgang von Weisl, Zvi Kolitz, and Abraham Stern. Their writings between the years 1922 and 1942 reveal a strong drive for social integration, similar to that manifest in other fascist movements of the interwar era.

Flesh and stone. The body and the city in western civilization. By Richard Sennett. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. Pp. 431. ISBN 0-571-17390-X. £25.00

Renaissance warrior and patron. The reign of Francis I. By R. J. Knecht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xxv+612. ISBN 0-521-41796-1. £45.00.

The early modern city 1450–1750. By Christopher R. Friedrichs. London: Longman, 1995. Pp. ix+381. ISBN 0-582-01321-6. £14.99.

The court artist. On the ancestry of the modern artist. By Martin Warnke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xx+299. ISBN 0-521-36375-6. £35.00.

Renaissance and revolution. Humanists, scholars, craftsmen & natural philosophers in early modern Europe. Edited by J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xv+291. ISBN 0-521-43427-0. £37.50.

In spite of occasional protests Lord Beaverbrook's narrative of British domestic politics during the first world war seems to retain the authority of a primary source. This is particularly true of the passages in Politicians and the war, 1914–1916 which cover the events in which he, then Sir Max Aitken, claimed to have taken an influential part. Mr A. J. P. Taylor in his appraisal of Beaverbrook's second volume covering the fall of Asquith in 1916 declares: ‘ It provides essential testimony for events during a great political crisis — perhaps the most detailed account of such a crisis ever written from the inside... The narrative is carried along by rare zest and wit, yet with the detached impartiality of the true scholar. ‘ Beaverbrook's apparent advantages might well seem conclusive. He was a contemporary agent as well as observer, summed up in his jaunty ‘ I was there!’. He was supposed to have enjoyed the complete confidence of Bonar Law, to have run a newspaper and to have kept a diary. An M.P. and virtual parliamentary private secretary to Bonar Law, whose rise to the Commons party leadership he appeared to have engineered, Aitken could be presumed to be politically on the ‘inside’. A tycoon of Canadian business ‘mergers’ and a self-made millionaire at a young age, he was esteemed by Law to be one of the cleverest men he knew.

This article seeks to revise existing interpretations of the political writings composed by the early Stuart MP, Sir John Eliot (1592–1632), while imprisoned in the Tower of London between 1629 and 1632. In particular, it challenges the common understanding of Eliot as an absolutist writer. This characterization is shown to be based on a misreading of his principal treatise, The monarchie of man, and the problematic assumption that De jure – a translation he undertook of the continental absolutist, Arnisaeus – should be taken to epitomize Eliot's own views. The article also refutes the notion that The monarchie of man is an uncontroversial text that ignores contemporary political context. It is argued that the treatise can, in fact, only be read in relation to the constitutional crisis of the late 1620s: Eliot's work is presented as a subversive attack on Charles I's tyrannical pretensions, which supplies a remedy in the form of a Ciceronian insistence on active virtue. These findings in turn have implications for how we understand the political thought and culture of early Stuart England more generally.

In a whimsical scene of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the pope and the Cardinal of Lorraine enter the banquet hall only to have an invisible Faustus snatch away their dinners and, in a truly spectacular exit, scatter the banquet hall with fireworks.1 The Cardinal of Lorraine has been surrounded by fireworks for four hundred years. This is an effort to give him some peace at last.

The concern here is a symposium of quite another sort, the Colloquy of Poissy. Poissy, the last great Colloquy of the Reformation, was an attempt at religious reconciliation of Calvinist and Catholic within the framework of the Gallican Church.

The field of Anglo-Irish administrative history, comprehensively surveyed by Dr R. B. McDowell, has been subjected to little detailed analysis. This article attempts to fill the gap in one important respect. It sets out to examine the role of the Irish Board of Works during the famine years. In 1846–7, at a time of grave national crisis, the Board of Works tackled the near-impossible task of providing public works for the relief of almost every family in Ireland. Despite the Treasury's efforts to control abuses, the Board of Works proved unequal to the task, and had to be replaced as the main tool of government policy.

Thomas Cranmer's register is important in shedding valuable shafts of light on the nature of the episcopal office in Tudor England. Despite the government's break with Rome in the 1530s, much of the archbishop's routine administration continued unaltered. Nonetheless, there were profound changes in Cranmer's role. Royal commissions, proclamations, injunctions, letters missive and acts of parliament all served to modify Cranmer's position as principal minister of the king's spiritual estate. When the crown issued a commission to the archbishop for the exercise of his jurisdiction, the prelate's position as a royal official was clear for all to see. It is sure, however, that the impact of Christian humanism and reformed theology also did much to shape Cranmer's work. The enforcement of the English Litany and, most notably, of the 42 Articles reveal the changing nature of the episcopal office at this time. In contrast to received orthodoxy, it is now clear that the bishops mounted a widespread campaign at the end of Edward VI's brief reign to secure use of this reformed formulary. There can be little doubt that Thomas Cranmer's years at Canterbury were of great significance in reshaping the role of the episcopate in early modern England.

The ripening of the Anglo-American friendship in the first half of the nineteenth century was truly an evolutionary process, but most observers agree that in the diplomatic sphere the significant aspects of that early rapprochement took place about the time of the Webster–Ashburton agreement. One previously unknown factor involved in this development centred on British and American cooperation in the Belgian indemnification dispute in the late thirties and forties. This struggle by several major powers aimed at receiving indemnities from the newly created state for property damages incurred during the Belgian revolution of 1830 in Antwerp.

In December 1930 Sir Victor Wellesley, the deputy under secretary at the Foreign Office, and its expert on Far Eastern finance, circulated a 29-page ‘Proposal for the establishment of a Politico-Economic Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office.’ This memorandum was prompted by the growing importance of tariffs, and various forms of investment, as instruments of foreign policy, and concern at his colleagues' failure to understand the political consequences. With economic nationalism in the ascendant, Wellesley recognized that Britain soon would have to consider whether she would ‘take part in the scramble for economic hegemony’. He hoped Cabinet would decide against tariffs and imperial preference, but was worried that the Foreign Office would be ill-equipped to defend this viewpoint. It was not that the Office lacked adequate sources of economic information, but rather that the division of duties between the Department of Overseas Trade and the Foreign Office precluded their assimilation with political appreciations. Although seventy five per cent of the work of the average mission was economic or commercial, this was generally left to the commercial counsellor, who reported directly to the Department of Overseas Trade. Political dispatches were forwarded to the appropriate Foreign Office department and there examined in virtual isolation. Moreover, the dominant attitude of mind among senior diplomats was, if not actually predisposed against economic work, at least so lacking in understanding that their efforts were often misdirected.

Zeroing in on private garden plots, the article discusses the manner in which Germans portrayed themselves in relation to displaced persons (DPs) – former foreign workers, Allied prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates – in immediate post-Second World War Hanover. Challenging the notion that a coherent narrative of German victimization truly emerged only in the 1950s, the article reveals how German gardeners already articulated loudly a discourse through which they sought to depict themselves as decent, hard-working sufferers, while portraying displaced persons as immoral and dangerous perpetrators. The plots of garden owners, as foci of German yearnings for Heimat, came particularly under threat. Germans cherished such sites, not only because they provided the opportunity for procuring additional sustenance amidst a post-war world of scarcity, but because they symbolized longings to inhabit a peaceful, productive, and beautiful space into which the most turbulent history could not enter, and upon which a stable future could be constructed. Only with the removal of DPs could Germans claim for themselves the status of victims, while branding DPs perpetrators, and reaffirm past patterns of superiority and inferiority in both ethical and racial terms. In so doing, Germans could realize the innocence integral for achieving Heimat and establish democratic stability after 1945.