Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, like most other Restoration politicians, has suffered from a bad press. He has always been spoken of slightingly by what J. P. Kenyon calls the “bed-spring and chamber-pot” school of Restoration historians; and for once the serious scholars have agreed with the romancers. David Ogg, for instance, says of Arlington, “He had the gift for making the right friends and discarding them at the right moment; but as he lacked courage, he never rose to real greatness among the bad men of Charles's Court. … Always civil and obliging, his chief talent was that of anticipating and fostering what he thought to be the secret wishes of his royal master.” Arlington's biographer, Miss Violet Barbour, says nothing quite so harsh as that, but her implied opinion is clearly not very high. Of modern historians only Keith Feiling, in his work on British foreign policy from 1660 to 1672, is at all favorable. Most of Arlington's British contemporaries took an equally critical view of him. The attacks of Burnet and Clarendon are well known. Here is what the Duke of Buckingham, Arlington's great rival in the Cabal, had to say in his poem, “Advice to a Painter To Draw my L. A-----ton, Grand Minister of State”:

First draw an arrant fop, from top to toe

Whose very looks at first dash shew him so:

Two goggle-eyes, so clear, tho' very dead,

That one may see, thro' them, quite thro' his Head.

Let every nod of his, and subtle wink

Declare the fool would talk, but cannot think.

Let him all other fools so far surpasse

That fools themselves point at him for an ass.

Whether all this denigration is entirely deserved is open to serious doubt. Foreign observers had no such low opinion of Arlington. When he became secretary of state in 1662, the Venetian resident described him as "a man of wit and ability, affable and courteous, possessing several languages, . . . and competent for his position from his knowledge of the interests of foreign princes." And nine years later another Venetian resident called him "tried and prudent."

A single eighteenth-century British manuscript recipe book, bound in parchment decorated with gold tooling, can tell us an enormous amount about Britain's gastronomic and imperial ambitions. That is because this book, now known by its call number, V.a.680, and held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, contains recipes like “Indian Pickle,” which included ginger, garlic, cauliflower, mustard, turmeric, and long pepper. How did this distinctly South Asian recipe find its way into a London recipe book? In this essay, we explore how British households engaged with and circulated new ideas about food during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We analyze two remarkable recipes, one for mutton kebabs and another for sago pudding, both brought to Britain through emerging imperial projects. Although one recipe originated in the eastern Mediterranean and the other in Southeast Asia, both were changed and altered to suit British metropolitan tastes. We then examine the book itself as a material object created and altered over time, offering evidence of the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts were amended, torn apart, repaired, organized, and ultimately professionalized over multiple generations. As physical testaments to the social alliances and networks of knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons, manuscript recipe books were tools of empire, used to appropriate, translate, and transmit the global foodways that permeated Britain's earliest colonial schemes.

In an age as confusing and volatile as the interwar period, it was perhaps to be expected that the main theme in literature among younger writers and poets particularly would be the social, political, and economic malaise of the time. Indeed, it was the delineation and analysis of this malaise and its relationship to individual life that set the tone of the so-called thirties poetry in Britain and which provided the focal point of W. H. Auden, the most distinguished and versatile English poet of the 1930's. Auden's work in the thirties was characterized by persistent intellectual effort and endurance. For as his contemporary John Lehmann pointed out, W. H. Auden was “the spiritual physician of his generation.” And he was the spiritual physician because more than any other prestigious English litterateur of the interwar years, Auden sought to resolve what seemed to be the most critical problem of the time: how the individual might take effective political action without losing his moral integrity. Or as Auden put the problem as early as 1930:

I should like, therefore, to examine two of W. H. Auden's works which most directly confront the problem of individual commitment to collective political action: “Spain,” and Journey to a War.

The famous poem “Spain,” written in April 1937 and published in May of that year, seemed to announce that at last Auden offered unequivocal endorsement of politicial action. The poem further develops a theme set forth in his celebrated Look Stranger (1935) — the moral responsibility of carefully considered choice and action. The Spanish Civil War, to Auden, is the clear opportunity of an individual to make a decision and to act. A person could either do nothing, which in the face of the Fascist threat is virtually to commit moral suicide, or he could act in unison with other individuals against Fascism. In Auden's view, not only does the Spanish Civil War represent a crisis situation in the history of his generation, it represents also a pivotal point in the intellectual history of the Western World. Accordingly Auden places himself and his generation in a profoundly meaningful historical context. The first stanzas of the poem summarize the ingredients of the Weltanschauung which culminated in twentieth-century liberalism, with its political manifestation in Western parliamentary democracy. The poet also sketches the history of the application of science to conquer the natural world and the gradual victory of scientific method over the ages in which religious faith explained the whole of the world as but a symbol of a transcendental order.

The standard interpretation of 1848 in Britain is that while Continental Europe reached a turning point and failed to turn, as the famous aphorism states, Britain reached its turning point in 1832, turned, and thus avoided revolution in that year of revolutions. The British middle classes, unlike their Continental counterparts, were loyal in 1848. They enjoyed a broader franchise, some reforming legislation already passed, and commitments to various welcome changes in the future made by diverse politicians. All of this gave the British middle classes great confidence in British institutions and their own future under them, as well as the belief that their country was fortunately different from all the other nations. Without the middle classes, the Chartists could have never succeeded with any kind of insurrection. So, while the capitals of Europe echoed with sounds of musketry and cannon, Britain was at peace because her Constitution was essentially better than anything that prevailed elsewhere.

Modern historiography has done little to change this interpretation of 1848 that was first proclaimed by self-congratulatory and relieved Victorians. All the accounts stress the fortunate uniqueness of Britain and the key role of middle class loyalty. Priscilla Robertson wrote, “During the days of 1848, England stood apart, unshaken, apparently unshakable. Her reformers were already in power. …” In a recent study of the 1848 revolutions, Peter Stearns focuses on the ways the middle class abetted Continental revolutions at the same time that they were instrumental in preventing revolution in Britain. These are really restatements of Elie Halévy's classic explanation. While John Saville's treatment of 1848 differs from traditional accounts in several ways, particularly in stressing the vigor of the Chartist left's resistance after April 10, his explanation for the failure of revolution does not. He concludes that the British government could count on “whole-hearted support” much further down the social scale than could Continental governments. Moreover, despite all the newer research on political violence, crowds, and revolution, the standard interpretation of Britain's fate in 1848 remains: middle-class support for the regime was too strong while Chartist support for an insurrection was too weak.

In his essay on “The Reputation of Edmund Burke” Thomas W. Copeland offers a timely analysis of the context and climate of contemporary Burke studies. His remarks suggest also the acceleration in pace of those studies. Current publication relevant to Burke has been noticed for the past four years in the Burke Newsletter. Reporting and reviewing new publication on or near Burke, retailing schemes and dreams and work in progress, and purveying personal news and opinion of students of Burke, the Burke Newsletter resembles in scope the Johnsonian Newsletter, edited by James L. Clifford and John H. Middendorf at Columbia University, which, of course, has for some time kept its readers up to date on the bibliography of the age of Burke and Johnson.

Copeland's essay, furthermore, is sufficient counterweight to another recent critical appraisal professedly directed to something of the same purpose – W. T. Laprade's impatient, hostile excursion through a century or more of writing on Burke. Without attempting the detail of the Newsletter, therefore, and without retreading Copeland's ground, the present survey undertakes to provide an account of significant trends and characteristic contributions in Burke studies for roughly the period since World War II. That span of years covers the time, or a little more, that the main body of Burke's papers has been generally open for study. It also includes the time when ideological and socio-political patterns have stimulated resort to the familiar past for spokesmen and scapegoats with whom to undergird and extenuate contemporary controversy.

This review article has a conventional purpose, namely, to assess the contributions made by thirteen recent books, most by British historians, to the history of British foreign policy and the European states system during the revolutionary, Napoleonic, and post-Napoleonic eras. There is, however, a problem. None of the books is conventional diplomatic history. Almost half relate only indirectly to foreign policy, while for the remainder foreign policy constitutes only part of their subject matter. The review therefore consciously runs two risks: that of judging the books by inappropriate standards and that of drawing conclusions about current historiography in this field and period from an inappropriate sample. The reader will have to judge whether the results justify the procedure.

Geoffrey Best's War and Society in Revolutionary Europe illustrates the problem. Best clearly succeeds in his goal of going beyond the study of military organizations to the study of war itself as a “unique human interest and activity.” The book is far-ranging, delightfully written, based on wide reading, and packed with insights. It also contributes substantially to the history of international politics, mainly by demonstrating how powerful an impact armies and combat had. Yet from the political historian's standpoint there is ground for some frustration as well as for pleasure. Best's descriptions of how armies developed from the Old Regime into the nineteenth century and his analyses of the impact of war in 1792–1815 are excellent for France and Britain and adequate for Prussia and Spain.

This essay examines the history of the safety razor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it explores male shaving practices and the male investment in physical appearance in the age of industrial capitalism. In highlighting the history of a single material artifact to showcase the relationship between masculinity, good grooming, personal success, and notions of self-improvement, this essay also underscores the growing influence of American products in British life, the intricacies of the consumer economy, and the increasing sophistication of advertising practices.

This article explores the events surrounding the Monitor controversy, which stemmed from radical criticism of the crown's conservative approach to the war between Spain and Great Britain in 1762. While some observers wished to quickly bring the war to an end, others expressed more radical plans for the destruction of the Spanish Empire. When the crown retaliated against prominent agitators with a round of arrests designed to silence their dissent, the result was a succession of legal cases that culminated with Entick v. Carrington in 1765. In their arguments, the plaintiffs expressed concern that the British Empire was seemingly in danger of evolving into an oppressive, allegedly “Spanish” style of polity. These legal processes and the precedents they set were critical to the development of protected space for political dissent in the British Empire, and affirmed a more broadly participatory model for the future development of imperial policy.