With his unparalleled genius for self-promotion, Benjamin Disraeli advised us to ‘read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory’. Historians of the British Conservative party have followed his instructions faithfully, long seduced by the charms of the political biography. In recent years alone the world has seen the publication of two scholarly and highly flattering biographies of the third marquess of Salisbury, by Andrew Roberts and David Steele, alongside a reconstruction of the distinctive Salisburian philosophical world by Michael Bentley, and a long overdue biography of Bonar Law by R. J. Q. Adams. Of the newer vintage, we now have Anthony Seldon's biography of John Major and the first instalment of John Campbell's deconstruction of Margaret Thatcher. One can only shudder with trepidation at the unedifying prospect of the weighty and earnest tomes devoted to William Hague or Iain Duncan Smith awaiting tomorrow's historians. The fates and fortunes of the party continue to be intertwined unproblematically with the qualities of its successive leaders. On one level this is inevitable, befitting the self-image of a party which has always valued leadership and hierarchy. But on another level the predilection for biography has encouraged Conservative studies to remain stubbornly immured within a set of sterile and untheoretical paradigms. The tendency is for narration rather than explanation, for ‘party’ to be defined institutionally rather than organically, and for the world of politics to be reduced to conversations held within the hermetic corridors of Westminster. The more imaginative and innovative work on Victorian and Edwardian politics to have appeared in recent years has been carried out by historians of the Liberal and Labour parties.

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion in scholarship about issues of gender in the history of modern Europe. Historians have taken up topics from the fall of Louis XVI during the Revolution to the role of women in fascism to demonstrate the pivotal importance that matters of sexual difference have made in shaping politics, culture, and society in the last centuries. Scholars have realized that interpretations of class dynamics, work relations, collective action, and nations at war, for example, look considerably different and are far more complex when attention is paid to gender. Where the study of women in the past was once relegated to the backwaters, now courses on women's history and gender have taken a permanent place in most university curricula. Histories that include women have moved from ‘her-story’ (crudely, the history of individual women and their accomplishments) to analyses that use gender as an interpretative prism through which to view larger social and political transformations.

The three books under review participate in this larger movement toward integrating the perspectives of gender into major issues of European history that have been researched by historians before, but from a standpoint that these authors find lacking. Margaret Arnot and Cornelie Usborne, as editors of a collection of essays on gender and crime, wish to correct some of the assumptions about women and crime that have been ignored by historians who focus mostly on more historically conspicuous male criminals. Ann-Louise Shapiro uses the trials of criminal women in late nineteenth-century Paris as ‘lightning rods’ that illuminate the social, political, and cultural conflicts of the fin-de-siècle.

It is nearly a quarter of a century since the publication in 1978 of Mark Girouard's magnificent study, Life in the English country house. The book appeared at what we can now recognize to have been an important moment for the stately homes of England. After the years of post-war austerity, the growth in private car ownership had begun to make the countryside increasingly accessible. Many of the weekend journeys spawned by this new affluence were to country houses, a trend speeded up by the exposure several high profile houses enjoyed as period settings for television dramas. Brideshead revisited in 1981 was the pioneer, set as it was in the grounds of Castle Howard. In many respects it has never been bettered, but it has certainly been followed, to the extent that hardly a great house has failed to attract a film crew and some have been visited repeatedly. Nor has this new exposure been confined to the cinema and television. The private mansions from which the working classes were traditionally excluded have opened their doors to paying customers, and their shops to anyone with cash and credit cards.