Historians have generally accepted the verdict that the 1902 Education Act was ‘among the two or three greatest constructive measures of the twentieth century’. Most have accepted likewise the interpretation laid down by the biographer of the Act's alleged author, Sir Robert Morant, that an educational crisis forced the Unionist government to begin thinking seriously about education. Their ineptitude, shown in attempts at legislation in 1900 and 1901, forced them to turn to the one man who could help, namely Morant, secretary to the vice president of the Board of Education, Sir John Gorst, and then to the president, the duke of Devonshire. Thus ‘Balfour, Hicks-Beach and Chamberlain had all to bow the knee to his [Morant's] ruthless tenacity in argument’, whilst Morant ‘had to show Balfour and the Cabinet how the policies of their party and their own inarticulate major premises inevitably led them to the 1902 Bill – as Morant was writing it’.

Almost forty years have passed since the UN mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, was assassinated in Jerusalem on 17 September, 1948 by the ‘Freedom Fighters of Israel’ (Lohamei Herut Yisrael. Hebrew acronym: LEHY), the smallest and most extreme of the three military organizations of the Yishuv (as the Jewish community in Palestine was called before the state of Israel came into being). The announcement made after the assassination was issued by ‘The Fatherland Front’ (Hazit ha-Moledet), a ‘front’ brought into being for the purpose by LEHY and which disappeared immediately afterwards. It declared that Bernadotte had been ‘an obvious agent of the British enemy’. Now that the British and American documents have been made available, this serious allegation can be examined, and as a result it can now safely be affirmed that the mediator acted in complete independence. He had no contact whatsover with British or American diplomacy over the political proposals that sealed his fate. These proposals he presented in his first Report on 28 June 1948.

Decolonization has had a significant impact upon the way that historians explain the process of Europe’s late nineteenth-century imperial expansion. Assumptions about superior technology now appear insufficient in themselves to account for the ability of relatively small armies to gain control over sizeable territory and populations in Africa and Asia. Although, as has recently been argued, advances in weaponry and medicine enabled Europeans to operate in tropical climates against less sophisticated opposition with devastating effect, differences in technology cannot explain the ability of less well-endowed national resistance movements to defeat colonial armies in the mid-twentieth century.1 Since 1945 various wars of national liberation have demonstrated that advanced technology, an impressive commitment of manpower, and an enormous expenditure of money cannot guarantee military success against a nationalist resistance in a colonial setting. If anything, this discrepancy in technological advantage between colonialist powers and anti-western resistance movements was as great or greater in the post-World War II era than in the late nineteenth century. Historians thus must seek additional explanations for the rapid advance of European conquest during the heyday of imperialism.

Over the last thirty years, the absolute monarchy in France has been a subject of much controversy among historians. The traditional view, which can be traced back to Tocqueville, sees it primarily as an ‘administrative monarchy’, an essential step in the formation of a centralized French state. More recently, this approach has come under sustained attack from (mostly Anglo-American) scholars, who have emphasized in contrast the limits of absolutism, and in particular the persistent power of local and central elites in relation to the crown. In the light of these disputes, this article argues that the French absolute monarchy was above all a political compromise, in which neither crown nor elites had the definitive upper hand, but which could only function effectively through the co-operation of both sides. An aspect that has not sufficiently been stressed, however, is the fragility of the arrangement: it was ambiguous in practice if not in theory, and ultimately unable to deliver the resources necessary to sustain France's great-power status in the eighteenth century.

The article seeks to establish the significance of intercepted Greek diplomatic messages as both historical source and catalyst in Britain's Near Eastern policy in the crucial years of 1920–2. Specifically, the intercepts reveal how members of the British government, foremost among them the prime minister, covertly supported Greek expansion in Asia Minor even after declaring neutrality in the conflict. Such evidence confirms rumours that were dismissed as fallacious by those implicated and by their defenders in later historiography. Aside from their value as historical sources, the intercepts had an immediate and significant impact which has also been neglected. Intelligence regarding a distant conflict became central to a war at the heart of Westminster and helped mobilize a cross-party, transnational coalition against Lloyd George's foreign policy in the region. Although Lloyd George's opponents, incited by intelligence revelations, eventually succeeded in transforming British policy, this reverse did little to reduce the scale of the resultant catastrophe.

Gender relations in German history: power, agency, and experience from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey. London: UCL, 1996. Pp. x+262. ISBN 1-85728-485-2. £12.95.

Adultery and divorce in Calvin's Geneva. By Robert M. Kingdon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1995. Pp. ix+214. ISBN 0-674-00520-1 (hb). £18.50.

Housecraft and statecraft: domestic service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. By Dennis Romano. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxvi+333. ISBN 0-8018-5288-9. £37.00.

The European nobility, 1400–1800. By Jonathan Dewald. New approaches to European history, ix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+209. ISBN 0-521-42528-x (pb). £12.95.

Garden and grove: the Italian Renaissance garden in the English imagination, 1600–1750. By John Dixon Hunt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996. Pp. xix+268. ISBN 0-8122-1604-0 (pb). £23.50.

Like an ancient woodsman or a guide through the Amazonian jungle, the ideal historian possesses at least two kinds of expertise: enough familiarity with the general terrain to plan successful expeditions and enough experience in the field to make inevitable adjustments to ‘the big picture’ when underway. Of course in the real world (of both geography and history) the tasks of exploration and cartography are often bifurcated, without necessarily disastrous results. The historian who is equally skilled at both close-up description and large-scale theorizing is consequently celebrated as a rare and valued anomaly. Meanwhile, for most of us stumbling scouts, the world beyond our familiar trails remains largely one of learned lore, with connections to our own limited forays often vague at best. Unless, of course, we are fortunate enough to come across something which provides an almost magical link between the narrow and the wide, the micro and the macro.

This article examines the control of outdoor advertising in Britain, tracking its development as a mirror of the practices of spatial governance. It evidences both a largely forgotten, yet radical change in the urban environment, whilst also functioning as a lens through which we might examine local government's role in driving change in the visual environment of cities and towns. The article argues that, despite important early work by preservationist organizations, local corporations and councils were the principal drivers of legislation, altering attitudes in central government that ultimately led to stringent control of outdoor advertising in urban space. Beginning in the nineteenth century, but coming to the fore during the interwar period, corporations and councils pushed for ever greater controls over the size and siting of billboards, hoardings, and posters. In doing so, they deployed a language of amenity, and conjured with seemingly social democratic notions of citizens’ rights to push their agenda. The study is thus revealing of the ways in which town planning, patterns of holistic control in the visual environment, and the philosophy of urban modernism shaped even the most mundane, extant urban areas and left a lasting impression on the urban landscape.

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.

All persons concerned with the Benthamites are indebted to William Thomas's ‘James Mill's Politics’ for reopening a crucial, complex and much-debated question and for offering a number of thought-provoking opinions on die subject. Despite the ingenuity of his essay, however, many of Thomas's conclusions merit further consideration. Most of the questionable points in his argument centre on three basic issues: the meaning of the Essay on Government; the import of James Mill's distinctive theory of propaganda; and the general perspective from which James Mill's politics should be studied. Thomas's position on these issues casts doubt on his entire approach to James Mill's political theory.

In the first year of Victoria's reign, the English reading public's expectations of ‘A new and complete edition’ of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments began to receive fulfilment, as the initial three volumes were issued by Seeley and Burnside. Not all were prepared to give the work a magnanimous reception. Chief among the detractors of that age was Samuel Roffey Maitland, destined in the near future to become librarian at Lambeth Palace under Howley's tenure as archbishop of Canterbury. This essay explores the nature of Maitland's fervent objections to Foxe and his martyrology, and also examines Maitland's relationship to the major religious movements of his day (including Tractarianism). It argues that Maitland was offended by what he perceived as Foxe's extreme partisan bias (as a member of the puritan wing of the English church) and equally, by the poor editorial job which he believed to have been performed in the Cattley/Seeley project. Furthermore, it maintains that Maitland had a sympathetic though rather complex relationship with the divines of the Oxford Movement, including John Henry Newman. Maitland's scholarly credentials as a Foxe critic are also examined.

Divisions in the Scottish political community that were evident by the end of the reign of James VI have been posited as roots of the Scottish revolution of 1638 and the wars of the three kingdoms. This article argues that the disengagement of central government from the political nation at large was a key factor in this development. By demonstrating the frequency of conventions of the estates, it highlights the intensity of consultation in James's Scottish government before 1603. A sudden decline in their frequency thereafter was symptomatic of a wider failure of government to adapt to the absence of the king in the context of a composite monarchy. While correspondence between the king and the privy council was copious, communication between the council and the political elites of Scotland withered. Without conventions of the estates as a vital point of contact in which new policies could be tested and negotiated, parliaments became more disagreeable. The crown's reliance on unprecedented levels of management and increased central direction alienated a significant proportion of the political elite, driving them into the oppositional stance which endured through the reign of Charles I.

Italy in the Cold War. Politics, culture & society, 1948–1958. Edited by Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff. Oxford/Washington DC: Berg. 1995. Pp. xi+228, index. £34.95

War in Italy 1943–1945. A brutal story. By Richard Lamb. London: Penguin Books. 1995 (1993). Pp. viii+335, maps and index. £7.99

Italy and the wider world, 1860–1960. By R. J. B. Bosworth. London and New York: Routledge. 1996. Pp. x+252, index. £40.00

‘America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth,’ Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. ‘And the American fighting man is second to none.’ ‘Exactly,’ agreed the old man pleasantly, with a hint of taunting amusement. ‘Italy, on the other hand, is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that's exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly [[ctdot ]] You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that's what makes us so strong’.

Of all the institutions that grew up in the medieval church none has received so little attention from English scholars as the chantries. That they played an important part in the religious life of this country before the Reformation is indeed generally recognised; but our historians have done little more than to indicate the purposes for which chantries were founded, and to point out that their numbers increased greatly towards the end of the Middle Ages. In the present essay an attempt is made to render our knowledge of the chantries less vague by discussing at length some of the more important problems of their history, giving a detailed account of them during a single half century. For this purpose the reign of Edward III has been chosen, partly because its close is practically contemporaneous with our most important literary references to the chantries, those of Chaucer and Langland, but mainly because, since the Black Death occurred within a few years of the middle of this period, it affords an opportunity of studying the effects of the pestilence on this phase of English life.