Churchill's ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, was a major effort to promote both a strengthened Anglo-American combination and a firmer western front against the Soviet Union. In the months between his electoral defeat and his talk at Fulton he had viewed Soviet consolidation in Europe with continuing concern, probably coupled with despair at his own inability to do very much about it. This presidential invitation, however, to deliver an address at an American college could provide a means to push to the fore the policies that he believed in. Certainly, the effect of his talk can be overestimated, but, despite its failure to create the very close alignment Churchill hoped for with the United States, it undoubtedly contributed to hardening western positions towards the Soviets.

At the close of five hundred years of European expansion in Asia, a new Zeitgeist has arisen: ‘Asian values’. The idea has been given wide international exposure, especially by intellectuals in the United States. It has formed the basis of a grand historical narrative in which they can locate themselves in the aftermath of the cold war. The rise of the west, it is argued, was marked by a succession of conflicts: the wars of princes, the wars of nations and, in the twentieth century, the wars of ideas. In the great struggle of our age, liberal democracy vanquished communism. However, it has not triumphed in the extra-European world. To explain this, the new meta-histories turn to the cultures that define civilizations. Old arguments about the cultural conditions for democracy have been given new focus. The great struggles of the twenty-first century will not be about ideology, but culture. The old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, calls the new cold war ‘the clash of civilizations’. Huntington has a number of civilizations in mind, but he is quite clear where the most deadly challenge lies. ‘Islam’, he writes, ‘has bloody borders.’

This article discusses the meaning of material culture in early modern Italian convents. Although nuns were required to give up private property rights and embrace religious poverty, many of them brought into the convent a vast range of material objects and goods for their personal use. These goods could also be given away, exchanged, or lent to others within the monastic community and even outside it. By exploring the circulation of objects, money, and goods, we get an interesting picture of how female monastic institutions worked internally and interacted with the city. We also gain a better understanding of the role of objects in articulating religious discipline and regulating the networks of interpersonal relations within cloistered communities.

The article examines the intellectual and ideological debate about the notions of duelling, courtesy, and honour in the Jacobean anti-duelling campaign. Particular attention is paid to the two most important contributions to this campaign – Francis Bacon's The charge touching duells (1614) and A pvblication of his matiesedict, and severe censvre against priuate combats and combatants (1614), written by Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton. By placing these two treatises into their intellectual context of courtesy and duelling manuals, the article seeks to demonstrate their sharply contrasting responses to the problem of duelling. Northampton accepted the notions of courtesy, honour, and insult underlying the duelling theory, but still wanted to abolish duelling. His solution was therefore a court of honour which would solve all the disputes of honour between noblemen and gentlemen. Bacon, on the other hand, argued that the only efficient way of getting rid of duelling was to question the entire intellectual framework on which duelling rested. To accept the notions of honour, courtesy, and insult inherent in the duelling theory and to set up a court of honour, he insisted, was tantamount to encouraging duelling itself. In The charge touching duells Bacon was thus arguing as much against Northampton's plans to suppress duelling as against the theory of duelling itself.

In the twelve months preceding the end of the Second World War, the International Committee of the Red Cross and various voluntary organizations acting with the Red Cross, were able to dispatch food parcels to increasingly large numbers of concentration camp inmates in Germany and German-controlled territory. As Allied pressure on Germany increased during the last months of the war, the possibilities of sending large-scale relief into the camps prior to their liberation expanded dramatically. However, Allied blockade policy was so deeply entrenched that it was almost impossible for these possibilities to be fully exploited. Official relief agencies failed to convince Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) that improving the rations of the camp inmates would not strengthen the German working force but would alleviate the problems that SHAEF itself would confront when it liberated the camps shortly thereafter.

Ten years after German unification, this historiographical review discusses how the cascade of published material reflects on two questions vital for contemporary history on this subject: first, why and how did unification happen, and second, what kind of sources and evidence are used by authors to justify their particular interpretation of events? In answering these questions, this review will not only give an overview of published accounts – official, scholarly, and autobiographical – but go beyond the immediate confines of the 1990s to shed light on the question of why Chancellor Helmut Kohl was able to win a prize that had eluded all of his predecessors since Konrad Adenauer.

In January 2003 Enoch Powell's personal archive was opened to the public. The release shed new light on the nature of Powell's thought on immigration, and in particular, his reasons for making the so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968. Historians have suggested that Powell's primary concern was a post-imperialist desire to sever all links with the New Commonwealth. However, papers written immediately after Powell's time in India (1943–6) reveal that his objections to immigration were established long before he abandoned his fierce love of empire in 1954. These objections were rooted in a seemingly liberal commitment to national homogeneity as a prerequisite for democracy. The imagery, reasoning, and political context of Powell's speeches in 1968 demonstrate a striking continuity with his ideas of 1946. Powell's example suggests that British attitudes to mass immigration may owe more to the experience of empire than to post-war changes in national identity.

Just over fifty years ago, Prime Minister Macmillan made an extensive tour of Africa, culminating in his ‘wind of change’ speech in Cape Town, 1960. This article traces Macmillan's progress through Africa with particular emphasis on his intervention in South African politics. It offers a novel reading of the ‘wind of change’ speech, arguing that the message was far more conciliatory with respect to white South African interests than is usually assumed. Pragmatism rather than principle was always the prime consideration. Far from being cowed by Macmillan's oratory or his message, Verwoerd stood up to Macmillan and, at least in the eyes of his supporters, gave as good as he got. The shock of the ‘wind of change’ speech was more evident in Britain and in British settler regions of Africa than in South Africa. Macmillan's advisers had an inflated view of the import of the speech and in many ways misread Verwoerd's brand of Afrikaner nationalism. One of the consequences of the speech was to embolden Verwoerd politically, and to prepare him for the declaration of republican status in 1961 and departure from the commonwealth.

When I had the pleasure of reviewing Nicholas von Maltzahn's study of Milton's History of Britain, I had nothing but praise for the scholarship he brought to the whole intellectual background of the work, and for his judicious placing of it in the Miltonic canon. His book gives an excellent account of the state of British historiography in the first half of the seventeenth century, and shows how Milton's essentially humanist and literary conception of what a history should be, and his exclusive interest in narrative sources, made him already out of date in his method at a time when Spelman and Selden were pioneering a recognizably modern form of historical scholarship. He carefully traces the development of Milton's ambition to write a great national history, explaining why his first conception of a verse epic, singing the heroic past, gave way to that of a lofty prose narrative that would culminate in a celebration of God's presence with his elect nation in the struggle for religious and civil liberty in his own time. He deals fully and learnedly with the influences upon the style and content of the History, from Sallust (Milton's favourite exemplar) and Tacítus through Bacon (possibly) to the preachers of the Fast Sermons before the Long Parliament. He is illuminating about the close association in Milton's mind between eloquence and virtue, and about the ways in which his beliefs about the operation of divine providence modified his predominantly classical approach to the writing of history. He is thoroughly informative about the textual history of the work, and especially about the fragment published in 1681 as Mr John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament, whose editor he convincingly identifies as the arch-Tory Roger L'Estrange.

The work of one member of the British intelligence mission in Russia was once described as ‘consist[ing] chiefly in passing little notes to other noodles of his calling all over the world to warn them of this or that innocent and bar their exit from or entry to all and sundry countries’. Others, even less charitable, characterized the intelligence mission and the war propaganda bureau as ‘joy rides’ and dismissed them entirely, discounting as worthless their efforts to promote closer understanding and coordination between Britain and her eastern ally.

In one fundamental sense, a British post-war consensus certainly existed: repudiation and denigration of interwar governments and their leaders. Stanley Baldwin was the chief victim, as it became widely believed during the 1940s that he had ‘failed to rearm’ the nation in the 1930s. Examination of the history of Baldwin's reputation after his retirement – precisely why and how it collapsed – reveals a striking case of the contingent construction of historical interpretation. Partisan politics, legitimation of a new regime, a Churchillian bandwagon, self-exoneration, and selective recollection together reinforced hindsight and a wartime appetite for scapegoats to create a public myth, which despite manifest evidence to the contrary was accepted as historical ‘truth’ by historians and other intellectuals. The main indictment was accepted even by Baldwin's appointed biographer, who added a further layer of supposed psychological deficiencies. Attempts to establish an effective defence were long constrained by official secrecy and the force of Churchill's post-war prestige. Only during the 1960s did political distance and then the opening of government records lead to more balanced historical assessments; yet the myth had become so central to larger myths about the 1930s and 1940s that it persists in general belief.

[This article has been inspired by Dr Stella Kramer's recent book, The English Craft Gilds (Columbia University Press, 1927), and is, in fact, an inquiry into it. In this, her second work on the subject, she has dealt with the last phase, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. Her material is drawn principally from the published records of towns and gilds, of which she has made so thorough an investigation that any one who has the temerity to follow in her steps will have an unprofitable task. To one who, some years ago, covered a fraction of the same ground with the same object in view and arrived at some tentative conclusions, the temptation to use Miss Kramer's exhaustive study to test and amplify those conclusions is irresistible.]

On 28 July 1540 Thomas Cromwell went to execution, and two days later Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome, leading protestant preachers and the minister's protégés, were burned at the stake.1 These reformers were sacrificed to implicate Cromwell in apostasy, but their deaths were more than judicial murder; they died for making a reality of the conservatives’ old fears that religious radicalism would engender social disorder. With the coming of the Reformation issues of faith for the first time deeply divided the people, and the rift went beyond the schism between orthodox and reformed alone. Many who witnessed the confusion thought that ‘the devyll reyneth over us nowe’ and believed that ‘alle thys devysyon comyth through that ffalse knave that heretyke Doctor Barnys and such other heretiks as he ys’.2 The faction struggles in court and council which dominated the last years of Henry VIII's reign produced the shifting policies of reaction or toleration towards reform, but while political intrigue determined the incidence of persecution and decided the victims the events of 1540 were to reveal that Protestantism was spreading independently, thwarting the restoration of Catholic orthodoxy, whatever the policy of government. The religious history of London was inextricably linked with the feuds of contending factions at court in the confused months of the spring and summer of 1540, not least because many of the protagonists and persecuted were Londoners themselves. The tensions witnessed in the capital between orthodox and reformed, and popular disturbance there, underlay all the machinations in high politics and influenced the outcome.

There are few questions as intriguing and as baffling as the reasons for the terror unleashed upon the U.S.S.R. from 1936. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the issue in the light of further research into the social, economic and political problems faced by Stalin from 1932.

This article reinterprets the post-Suez British role in the Middle East through a comparison of the military interventions in Jordan in 1958 and Kuwait in 1961. Moreover, it places these operations in the broader context of the debate about British decline. It is argued that in addition to the familiar constraints on British action imposed by limited resources and the changing international climate, the projection of power in the region proved to be a great test of nerve for British ministers and officials. Paradoxically, this proved to be true as much of the successful interventions in Jordan and Kuwait as of the earlier failure over Suez. Utilizing very recently released documents from British and American archives, the article aims to shed light on the dynamics of decline at the microcosmic level, in the belief that insights gleaned here may well be of value in revising macrocosmic theories of the process.

This article attempts to establish a connection between the practical legitimation of war and the theories of international law, examining Sweden's efforts to justify her intervention in the Thirty Years War in 1630. Swedish argumentative strategy is analysed in the light of two major traditions of thinking about war: theological and humanist ‘just war’ traditions. The article argues that Swedish leaders did not appeal to the more belligerent humanist arguments which would have enabled them to describe their campaign as a just war either on the grounds of pre-emptive defence or humanitarian intervention. Instead, they tried to interpret it as being within the limits set by the more restrictive theological tradition. This strategy eventually forced them to relinquish attempts to present their intervention as a genuine war and to develop an argument of ‘police-action’, even though it resulted in a loss of credibility. The case study suggests that in the early seventeenth century the prevailing normative language of just war was that of the theologians.

There is one major gap in the historiography of British strategic policy during the interwar years. Historians have not examined that policy of the 1920s as if it was a coherent topic in its own right. Although writers like Brian Bond, James Neidpath, Stephen Roskill and Malcolm Smith have elucidated aspects of that matter, such as the development of the Singapore base or of the policies of the fighting services, they have still treated each such issue and department in isolation from the rest. Even those scholars like Correlli Barnett and N. H. Gibbs who have sought to examine strategic policy in the interwar years as a whole, have primarily seen the strategic decisions of the 1920s not as an autonomous historical subject but rather as a prelude to Britain's position in the 1930s. Consequently, historians have made these decisions seem inexplicable and unconnected, by removing them from the context of their time and of strategic policy. This approach has led writers to misconstrue the evolution of strategic policy during the 1920s. They have done so because of their assumptions about that issue. They have not recognized these assumptions as being such, but have treated them instead as a bedrock of self-evident fact. Yet when these assumptions are examined, they can be demonstrated to be false.