IX�Twentieth Century

© 2006 The Author.Journal compilation © 2006 The Historical Association.

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.Oxford, UKABHLAnnual Bulletin of Historical Literature0066-3832© The Historical Association90Original ArticleANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURETWENTIETH CENTURY90Original ArticleANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURETWENTIETH CENTURY

IX Twentieth Century

(i) British History

Keith

Laybourn

General: biography, reference and wide-ranging

There have been a few substan-tial biographies in 2004, although they have been largely of left-wing figures. Twostand out. M. Newman,

Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left

(Merlin, 2003,£15.95) deals with a socialist academic of international standing who wrote two seminalworks

Parliamentary Socialism

(1961) and

The State of Capitalist Society

(1969) whilstworking at the London School of Economics. Miliband was a founder of

New LeftReview

and

Socialist Register

and by 1965 had come to the conclusion that the LabourParty could not be converted to socialism. He sought to develop alternative strategybut by the end of the Thatcher era had come to the view that social democracy was theonly alternative to Thatcher’s conservatism. H. Purcell has also written

The Last EnglishRevolutionary: a Biography of Tom Wintringham 1898–1949

(Sutton)

.

a book on apolitical figure from a rich East Riding of Yorkshire landholding family who joined theCommunist Party of Great Britain, although he became disenchanted with the CPGBover its conduct of the Spanish Civil War. Wintringham was one of the founders of thewartime ‘Dad’s army’ where he became, as George Orwell suggested, ‘a notable voicestemming the tide of defeatism’ and with Tom Driberg, and others, was a member ofthe Common Wealth Party. Purcell has also written, ‘Tom Wintringham: RevolutionaryPatriot’ (

Hist. Today

, 54) Otherwise, there is a A. Adonis and K. Thomas (eds),

RoyJenkins – A Retrospective

(OUP, £18.99) which is a collection of recollections aboutJenkins from people who knew him. This includes interesting personal information ofJenkins, the son of a miner’s leader, Arthur Jenkins, who was an MP and PPS to ClementAttlee, and some interesting reflections by David Cannandine. However, one awaitsAdonis’s forthcoming biography on Jenkins. J. Milling, ’Leading the White CollarUnion: Clive Jenkins, the Management of Trade Union Officers, and the Politics of theBritish Labour Movement (

International R. of Social Hist’

, 49) also does a good jobin examining the growth of white-collar unionism and focuses upon Clive Jenkins, thecharismatic leader of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs(ASTMS). One should not overlook S. Pederson,

Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics ofConscience

(Yale U.P., £25) which examines the life of Rathbone (1872–1946) whowas at the forefront of social policy in the early twentieth century and the writer of

TheDisinherited Family

(1924). Also, missed from the 2003 list, there are P. Catterall (ed.),

The Macmillan Diaries: 1950–1957

(Macmillan, 2003, £25), J. Person,

Sir AnthonyEden and the Suez Crisis

(Macmillan, 2003, £47.50), D.R. Thorpe,

Eden: The Life andTimes of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon 1897–1973

(Chatto & Windus, 2003, £25),B. Maddox,

Maggie: The First Lady

(Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, £18.99) and last, butnot least, J. Campbell,

Margaret Thatcher, Vol. Two: The Iron Lady

(Jonathan Cape,2003, £25).

There have been a large number of more wide-ranging publications covering a dis-parate array of subjects. B. Porter,

The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society andCulture in Britain

(OUP, £25) examines the varied responses to Empire in the nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries and goes beyond the static atmospheres of a nationbesotted with Kipling, Elgar and Mafeking Night. There is also an original set ofessays, with a different twist, in P.D. Morgan and S. Hawkins (eds),

Black Experience

134 ANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURE


and the Empire

(OUP, £30). J. Benson,

The Working Class in Britain

(I.B. Tauris, 2003,pbk £14.95) offers an excellent examination of the wages, incomes, cost of living andthe actions of the working class which has now been revised and published in paper-back. M.J. Weiner,

English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980

(CUP, £40, pbk £14.99) is a second edition of his book on the English ambiva-lence towards industrial society. A.J. Reid,

United We Stand: A History of Britain’sTrade Unions

(Allen Lane, £25) looks at the development of trade unionism in fifty-year cycles, covering the periods 1770–1820, 1820s–1870s, 1870s–1920s and 1920–1970s. It is useful, and is complemented by profiles of some of the prominent tradeunion leaders at various points, but is perhaps a little too comparmentalized. The GeneralStrike of 1926 does not fit in easily with the heyday of trade unions in the 1950 and1960s. The most impressive of these is P. Ward,

Britishness since 1870

(Routledge)which, in contrast to many other books on the subject, argues that Britishness and theunion is not collapsing but constantly reforming and reshaping. There is also a touchof Ward’s approach in E. Maziereska, S. Sydney-Smith and J.K. Walton,

RelocatingBritishness

(Manchester U.P., £50). Also worth reading in this vein is T. Kushner,

WeEuropeans? Mass Observation, Race and British Identity in the Twentieth Century

(Aldershot, Ashgate, £50).

Pre-War and First World War

For 2004 there has only been one pre-1914 studywhich has caught my attention. This is M. Brodie,

The Politics of the Poor: The EastEnd of London 1885–1914

(OUP, £50), an iconoclastic examination if the politicalviews of the poor in the East End of London which challenges the view that the residentsof the East End of London were poor slum dwellers, apathetic in politics and prone topopulist support for imperialism and protectionism, and were racist. Indeed, the poorof the East End of London emerge far more prosperous than they are usually presentedas being and likely to vote for the Labour Party and the Liberals just as much as theConservatives at the end of the Edwardian era.

Last year publications on the Great War focused upon the home front. This year themain studies have concentrated more with the war front. I.F.W. Beckett,

Ypres. TheFirst Battle 1914

(Pearson Education, £19.99) is an excellent study of the first greatbattle of the Great War, examining the importance of Ypres to the British army. A.Fletcher, ‘An Officer on the Western Front’ (

Hist. Today

, 54) offers a brief populararticle in which Anthony Fletcher, the famous social historian, examines the wartimecorrespondence of his grandfather who was killed shortly before the end of the War.T. Bowman,

Irish Regiments in the Great War: Discipline and morale

(ManchesterU.P., pbk £12.95) goes beyond the 312 cases of soldiers being ‘shot-at-dawn’ to examinethe treatment of some of the thousands of soldiers who faced courts martial through astudy of the Irish regiments. Examining the experience of the 10

th

(Irish), 16

th

(Irish)and 36

th

(Ulster) Divisions he suggests that most cases were of a minor nature andargues that execution only occurred when there was a need to instil discipline. Thereis also a welcome re-issuing of R. Graves’s 1929 classic autobiography

Good-Bye toAll That

(Berghahn Books, £14.95) which was for many years published in a Penguinedition. This includes a perceptive introduction by R.P. Graves. Also, though morebroad-ranging, is G. Braybon (ed.),

Evidence, History and the Great War: Historiansand the impact of 1914–18

(Berghahn Books, £50, pbk £15), which was advertised for2003 and came out in 2004, examines through a number of articles the relative minutiaeof war through a study if the impact of shellshock, the role on women, the problemsof refugees and other issues within a British and European context. There is also J.K.Watson,

Fighting Different Wars; Experience, Memory and the First World War in Britain

(CUP, £45) which examines the impact of the Great War upon post-war memories.

Political history since 1918

There was a resurgence of interest in British fascismlast year but this has all but disappeared in 2004. The only really significant publication

TWENTIETH CENTURY 135


is R. Moore-Colyar, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”: Jarian Jenks, Organicism, the Right andthe British Union of Fascists (

J. of Contemp. Hist.

, 40) which offers a re-examinationof the rural policy of the British Union of Fascists and looks at the career of JarianE.F. Jenks (1899–1963) a leading figure on the Soil Association between 1947 and hisdeath in 1963.

It is the Conservative Party which has drawn most interest. P. Williamson continueshis fascination with Baldwin in ‘Baldwin’s reputation: politics and history, 1937–1947’(

Hist. J.

, 47) in which he argues that despite the persistence of the ‘myth’ that Baldwinfailed to re-arm Britain the reality is that he did rather more than is suggested by amyth of indolence which legitimised the Churchillian age of the Second World War.There is also P. Williamson and E. Baldwin (eds),

Baldwin Papers: A ConservativeStatesman, 1908–1947

(CUP, £75) which offers a very good introduction to the papers,now deposited in Cambridge University Library, and sheds new light on the GeneralStrike of 1926, the events of 1931 and the Abdication crisis of 1936. C. Berthezene,‘Creating Conservative Fabians: The Conservative Party, Political Education and theFounding of Ashridge College’ (

P. and Pr.

, 182) incisively reflects upon attempts toovercome the vie of Lord Eustace Percy, the first director of the Conservative ResearchDepartment, that ‘Conservatism was intellectually a lost cause’ and the general feelingthat ‘The very idea of Conservative intellectuals has often seemed to be an oxymoron.’Nevertheless, Stanley Baldwin and the Conservative Party pushed for the formation ofthe Bonar Law Memorial College at Ashridge in Hertfordshire which effectivelybecame the Fabian Society of the Right pushing forward a Conservative ideology to setagainst the Socialist theory of society. The emerging ideology does not appear to havegiven the Conservative governments a clear approach according to G. O’Hare’s article,‘“Intractable, Obscure and Baffling”: The Incomes Policy of the Conservative Government,1957–1964’ (

Contemporary British Hist

., 18) which suggests that the Conservativegovernment’s incomes policy was driven by a desire to control inflation and end the‘stop-go’ pattern of economic development but failed largely because of departmentalism.However, R. Stevens, ‘The Evolution of Privatisation as an Electoral Policy,

c

. 1970–1990’ (

Contemporary British Hist.

, 18) examines the evolution of privatisation, themost enduring political and economic feature of Thatcherism which, in the long runwas a product of new Conservative ideology and old Gladstonian Liberalism.

The substantial revival of publications on Irish history, reported for 2003, hascontinued. F. Campbell, ‘The Social Dynamism of Nationalist Politics in the West ofIreland 1898–1918’ (

P and Pr.

, no. 182) examines the roots of the emergence of SinnFein in the 1918 general election as has E. Sasson,

Peare’s Patriots: St. Erda and theCult of Boyhood

(Cork U.P., £30). A.F. Parkinson,

Belfast’s Unholy War: The Troubleof the 1920s

(Four Courts P., £24.95) deals with the years 1920–2 which saw a levelof political and sectarian violence in Belfast not exceeded until the 1970s. Parkinsonshows how it was often children and innocent shoppers who were the victims of thisviolence during the formative years of the Northern Irish Government. E. O’Kane,‘Anglo-Irish Relations and the Northern Ireland Peace Process: From Exclusion toInclusion’ (


, 18) suggests that the British government movesfrom a position of excluding the Republican movement from the peace process to oneof inclusion in the 1990s because it detected a strand of republicanism which wasprepared to consider the political, rather than the military, route to settlement. M.Cunningham, ‘Apologies in Irish Politics: A Commentary and Critique’ (

ContemporaryBritish Hist.

, 18) suggests that Tony Blair’s apology for British policy in Ireland in the1840s was not really an apology when compared with the IRA’s apology for the injusticesit committed. There is also a second edition of J. Loughlin,

The Ulster Question since1945

(Palgrave, £16.99), an excellent brief study of the events relating to NorthernIreland since 1945.

Foreign policy and diplomacy has probably received more exposure than any othertopic in 2004, not least because of a special edition on the subjects edited by Gaynor



Johnson in

Contemporary British History

, 18. Johnson provides an introduction on ‘TheForeign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century’ in which she notesthat foreign policy and diplomacy are not the same thing. Z. Steiner, ‘The Foreign andCommonwealth: Resistance and Adaptation to Changing Times’ stresses the importanceof the expanding role of the Office of the Prime Minister. T.G. Otte, ‘The Old Diplomacy:Reflections on the Foreign Office before 1914’ suggests that the Old diplomacy ofBritain’s concern for a European equilibrium and the maintenance of British globalinterest was not all that British foreign policy was about. G. Johnson, ‘Preparing forOffice: Lord Curzon as Acting Foreign Secretary, January to October 1919’ suggeststhat Curzon worked well with A.J. Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, during this periodwhilst Balfour was involved in the Paris Peace Conference. A. Sharp. ‘Adapting to aNew World: British Foreign Policy in the 1920s’, offers a critical analysis of the Curzonand the Foreign Office in their relations with France, Germany, the United States andthe Soviet Union. Sequentially, B.J.C. McKechnie, ‘The Foreign Office, 1930–1939:Present Interest and National Security’ suggests that Robert Vansittart, the PermanentUnder Secretary at the Foreign Office, ran British foreign policy along the lines of olddiplomacy but that this changed when Neville Chamberlain took over direct personalcharge of foreign policy, which undermined British interest abroad. McKechnie arguesthat British foreign policy often worked better when British attitudes gradually evolvedto the protection of British interests. P. Neville continues with his work on Sir NevileHenderson in his article ‘The Foreign Office and Britain’s Ambassador to Berlin,1933–39’, in which he deals with the problems of the British Ambassador to Berlinand their relations with the Foreign office. It is apparent that Sir Nevile Henderson sawhimself as the personal envoy of Neville Chamberlain. There is also John Charmley’sessay on ‘Splendid Isolation to Finest Hour as a Global Power, 1900–1980’ chartsBritain’s move from isolation to commitment. Relations with the United States also figureprominently as they did in 2003. K. Ruane and J. Ellison,’ Managing the Americans:Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and the Pursuit of Power-by-Proxy in the 1950s’suggests that the Attlee Labour government attempted to use the United States by sup-porting the policies they felt they regarded as good, and subsequent Conservative govern-ments seem to have done much the same although the European dimension beganto emerge in the 1960s. This leads nicely on to S. Greenwood, ‘“Not the “General Will”but the Will of the General’: The Impact of the Paris Embassy to the British” GreatDebate’ on Europe, Summer 1960’ examines the way in which Lord Gladwyn, theBritish ambassador to France, felt that General De Gaulle would be an ally in Britain’sapplication to join the Six. There are also two other articles: A.J.K. Bailes, ‘Reflectionson Thirty Years of the Diplomatic Service’ and K. Hamilton, ‘Accommodating Diplomacy:The Foreign Office and Commonwealth Office and the Debate over Whitehall Redevel-opment’ and, in another volume of

Contemporary British History

, D. Bourantonis andE. Johnson, ‘Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Introduction of the Atomic Energyin the United Nation: Discord and Co-operation in 1945’ deals with the debate aboutwhether or not the issue of atomic energy should be deals with by the General Assemblyof the United Nation (the American position) or the Security Council (the Russianposition). Britain tried to find an enterprise on this although it favoured the use of theSecurity Council. T.C. Imlay, ‘A Re-assessment of Anglo-French Strategy during thePhony War, 1939–40’ (

E.H.R.

, 119) suggests what whilst the British and French wentto war in 1930 with a long-war strategy they were more adaptable that has been supposedin the Phony War period before returning to a long-war views after the fall of France.M.T. Thornhill, ‘Britain, the United States and the Rise of an Egyptian Leader: ThePolitics and Diplomacy of Nasser’s consolidation of Power, 1952’ (

E.H.R.

, 119),deals with Colonel Gamel Abdul-Nasser who emerged to power in 1952 as leader ofthe Wafd party which was strengthened in 1954 with the end of British occupation inIndia, which was endorsed by support from the American embassy. Two years later theSuez War made him an Arab hero, paving the way for the Nasserite revolution. M. Got,



‘Britain and Israel Before and After the Six-Day War, June 1967: From Support toHostility’ (


, 18), as the title suggests, indicates the way inwhich relations between Britain and Israel changed fundamentally as a result of thiswar. There is also G.W. Sand,

Defending the West: The Truman-Churchill Correspondence,1945–1960

(Praeger, £39.99) which deals with, in one volume, many of the lettersbetween Truman and Churchill which have been published separately in several othervolumes. It contains letters, one dated 12 May 1945, from Churchill to Truman in whichChurchill first used the phrase ‘iron curtain’, a term which came into public usage afterChurchill’s Fulton speech of 5 March 1946.

The Second World War has produced a mixed bag of offerings. J. Gardiner,

WartimeBritain 1939–1945

(Hodder & Stoughton, £20) examines the diaries, letters and reminis-cences of the half the army who never left Britain and the civilian population duringthe Second World War. There is M.H. Folly,

The Palgrave Atlas of the Second WordWar

(Palgrave, £14.99) and S.P. Mackenzie,

The Colditz Myth: British and Common-wealth Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany

(OUP, £20) which examines what it was liketo be a ‘Kriegie’. Also, one should not forget that 1944 saw the sixtieth anniversaryof D-Day and almost cottage industry of publications on the topic. There is Dan vander Vat,

D-Day: The Greatest Invasions – A People’s History

(Bloomsbury, £20)’;A. Williams,

D-Day to Berlin

(Hodder & Stoughton, £20) and R. Holmes,

The D-DayExperience From the invasion to the Liberation of Paris

(Carlton Books. Imperial WarMuseum, £30) and Jane Penrose (ed.),

The D-Day Companion

(Osprey, £20). Lastbut not least, there is also an important and innovative article by M. Connolly andW. Miller, ‘British Courts Martial in North Africa 1940–3’, examines the decision byAuchinleck, Montgomery and Alexander to impose discipline on to the British EightArmy by setting harsh examples through court martial proceedings. The disquietingaspect is those court martialled, whose sentences often averaged 2.7 years, did not neces-sarily receive fair trials. The most iconoclastic of these is, however, a book publishedin 2003. It is R. Mackay,

Half the Battle: Civilian Morale during the Second WorldWar

(Manchester U.P., 2003) which argues that Angus Calder and recent revisionistauthors have exaggerated the extent to which wartime unity and patriotism wasmythologized. Drawing largely from Mass Observation, Mackay argues that there wasgreat optimism in the possibility of victory by the British public. M. Connelly,

We CanTake It: Britain and Meaning of the Second World War

(Longman, £19.99) would qualifythis and feels that Britain has for too long lives of its finest hour.

For the post-war years there is a reminder of the peace protests of the 1960s. S. Carroll,‘“I was arrested at Greenham in 1962”: Investigating the Oral Narratives of Women inthe Anti-Nuclear Committee of 100’ (

Oral Hist.

, 32) examines the experiences of sixwomen connected with the Committee of 100 (1961–8) who were campaigning forBritish unilateral disarmament, using non-violent direct action. There is also T. Bucha-nan, ‘Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966–7’ (

20

th

Century British Hist.

, 15) revealsthe problems of Amnesty International, formed in 1961, when it was divided as aresult of its penetration by British Intelligence and revelations that it had providedsecret financial support for the families of detainees in Rhodesia. Also for the post-warperiod is R. Toye, ‘Churchill and Britain’s “Financial Dunkirk” (

20

th

Century BritishHist.

, 15) examines the way in which Churchill sought to help the post-war Labourgovernment by giving Conservative approval to the U. S. Loan for Britain, although itcaused some dissension within his party.

Economic and social history since 1918

One of the best books of the year is C.Chinn,

Better Betting with a Decent Feller: A Social History of Bookmaking

(Aurum,£16.99), which is an updated and substantial rewriting of a book which Chinn firstpublished in 1991. It is a superb history of the conflict between gambling and the anti-gambling movement, much information on illegal bookmaking being drawn from awide range of interviews which Chinn conducted with bookmakers in the late 1980s.



It particularly stresses the hypocrisy of a legal system which made off-course ready-money gambling by the working classes a criminal offence until 1961 whilst legalisingessentially middle-class off course credit betting and on-course betting. There is alsoD. Miers,

Regulating Commercial Gambling: Past, Present and Future

(OUP, £70, pbk£30), which examines the origins of and recent developments in betting, gaming andlotteries and does provide a path through the complex laws on gaming.

Studies on working-class life and the British way of life have become less commonin recent years. However, there are two new and significant contributions to our reading.First, J. Klein, ‘“Moving On”, “Men and the Changing”: Character of Interwar Working-Class Neighbourhoods: From the Files of the Manchester and Liverpool CityPolice’ (

J. of Social Hist.

, 38) suggests that there was very little change in the natureof neighbourhoods and working-class life during the inter-war years. In addition,A. Rosen,

The Transformation of British Life 1950–2000: A Social History

(ManchesterU.P., 2003, £9.99) examines the rapid social transformation of lives that occurred inthe fifty-five years after the end of the Second World War and is a useful book forundergraduates. G.O. Hara, ‘“We are Faced Everywhere with a Growing Population”:Demographic Change and the British State, 1955–1964’ (

20

th


, 15)complements this work. The working classes were, of course, often considered to be inneed of help by a settlement movement which sought to live amongst them andimprove their lot, and often wished to take them back to some golden age of working-class life. N. Vall, ‘Cultural Improvements in North-East England, 1920–1960: Polish-ing the Pitmen’ (

Northern Hist.

, 39) deals with the settlement movement in the Northof England, focusing upon Bensham Grove, Seaham Harbour and the Spennymoorsettlements.

On the social side of the Second World War although S. O. Rose pursues her previousresearch interests in

Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in WartimeBritain 1939–1945

(OUP, £17.99) which examines what it means to be British andJewish during the war, and also examines the experiences of American GIs, on whichRose has written some important articles. M. Harrison,

Medicine and Victory: BritishMilitary Medicine in the Second World War

(OUP, £45) examines the way in which theBritish army moved towards ensuring that there were proper health and medical provisionsavailable for troops as the War continued. Discipline and cleanliness were apparentlyas important as penicillin and DDT, in the medical contribution to winning the War.

Publications on British social habits and health investigations have been less commonthan in previous years. Nevertheless, R. Davidson and G. Davis, ‘“A Field for PrivateMembers”: The Wolfenden Committee and Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1950–1967’ (

20

th


, 15) deals with a committee which dealt with Prosti-tution and Homosexual offences between 1954 and 1957 and suggests that the Scottishlaws were less innovative than in England and Wales. Sex education seems to reflectthese problems in J. Hampshire and J. Lewis, ‘“The Ravages of Permissiveness”: SexEducation and the Permissive Society (

20

th


, 15). There is alsoP. Shapely, D. Tanner and A. Willing, ‘Civic Culture and Housing Policy in Manchester1945–79’ (

20

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, 15) looks at the relationship between civic andpolitical discourses and local discourses. V. Berridge and S. Blume (eds) have also pro-duced an excellent, and timely, contribution on the social inequalities of health in the1980s in

Social Inequality Before and After the Black Report

(Frank Cass, 2003, £17.50).The workings of local government and central government have been examined in

some very good publications this year. S. King, ‘“We Are To Be Trusted”: FemalePoor Law Guardians and the Development of the New Poor Law: The Case of Bolton,England 1880–1906’ (International R. of Social Hist., 49) is a particularly useful addi-tion to our knowledge for it examines the diary of Mary Haslan, who started her poorlaw activities on the workhouse visiting committee. R. Michie and P. Williamson, TheBritish Government and the City of London in the Twentieth Century (CUP, £60) is acollection of essays on the named subject. A. Woods, ‘“Flames and fears on the farms”:



controlling foot and mouth disease in Britain, 1892–2001’ (Hist. Research., 77) exam-ines how and why the Victorian policy of treating foot and mouth outbreaks with apolicy of slaughter which governments have continued to operate into the twenty-firstcentury. B. Penrose, ‘Medical Monitoring and Silicosis in Metal Mines: 1910–1940’(Labour Hist. R., 69) deals with the monitoring of a dangerous and ultimately fataldisease. R. Davidson, ‘The “Sexual State”: Sexuality and Scottish Governance. 1950–1980’ (J. of Modern Hist., 13) examines the way in which legal and moral issues havedefined and re-define ‘dangerous sexualities’.

The study of consumption and the rise of entertainment and leisure continue to provokeattention. L. Black, ‘Which craft? In Post War Britain: The Consumer’s Associationand the Politics of Affluence’ (Albion, 36) examines the politics of consumption inBritain after the Second World War which saw the emergence of then magazine Whichin 1957 and Motoring Which in 1962. It is a development beyond Black’s bookThe Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain? which was published in 2003. M.Huggins and J.K. Walton, The Teesside Seasides between the Wars: Redcar and itsneighbours 1919–31 (Middlesbrough, University of Teesside, 2003, £5.95) is a short,but useful, pamphlet). J. Williams, who has become increasingly productive in recentyears, has just produced Entertaining the Nation: A Social History of British Television(Sutton, £20), which examines the trends in the development of television and suggeststhat television is more a gatherer of existing information rather than an innovativeforce for change.

The economic failure of British governments are highlighted in number of works.G.T. Johannesson, ‘How “cod war” came: the origins of the Anglo-Icelandic fishing dis-pute, 1958–1961’ (Hist. Research, 72) examines the origins of the Cod War betweenBritain and Iceland which occurred between 1958 and 1961 and suggests that that theBritish government lost because of a lack of innovation and foresight. H. Pemberton,‘Relative Decline and British economic policy in the 1960s’ (Hist. J., 47) suggests thatBritain’s economic decline has often been blamed upon the fragmentation of Britain’seconomic institutions but this article suggests that this was due to strong governmentrefusing to recognise the need for change. R. Ray, ‘No Secrets Between “SpecialFriends”: America’s Involvement in British Economic Policy, October 1964–Apil1965’ (History, 89) suggests that the special relationship survived despite the ill-feelingbetween Lyndon Johnson and Harold Wilson. N. Woodward, The Management of theBritish Economy 1945–2001 (Manchester U.P., £49.99, pbk £15.99) also examines theactive role played by British governments.

Labour history Interest in the Labour Party has lulled since the celebrations of theformation of the Labour Representation Committee in 2000 but will undoubtedly riseas we reach the centenary of the Labour Party in 2006. Nevertheless, there are fourpublications that ought to be noted. J. Nuttall, ‘Tony Crosland and the Many Falls andRises in British Social Democracy’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) traces the declineof the ideas of Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956). J. Tomlinson, ‘The Labourparty and the capitalist firm, c. 1950–1970’ (Hist. J., 47) is a perceptive article whichexamines the way in which the structure of the capitalist firm was examined by theLabour Party within its attitude towards tackling the need for economic growth, partlyin response to the president of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson’s, pronouncement inthe late 1940s that between private industry and the Attlee Labour Government thereis ‘almost a vacuum in socialist thought’. There is another take in Labour’s incomespolicy by G. O’Hara in ‘“Planned Growth of Incomes” or “Emergency Gimmick”? TheLabour Party, The Social Partners and Incomes Policy, 1964–1970’ (Labour Hist. R.,69) which argues that the Government was confused about the reasons for the incomespolicy it adopted and both the trade unions and employers were sceptical of it. Comingright up to date R. Toye, ‘“The Smallest Party in History”? New Labour in HistoricalPerspective’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) challenges the view of Steven Fielding that New



Labour under Tony Blair has been faithful to Labour’s past. Toye suggests that this is notthe case and that Fielding has concentred upon the Parliamentary Labour Party ratherthan the Labour Party. To Toye, New Labour is a small, but influential, party which existsalongside Old Labour. This should be measured against J. E. Cronin, New Labour’sPasts: The Labour Party and its Discontents (Pearson, £25) which deals with NewLabour activities in the 1950s argues that New Labour was not really necessary in1994 because of Labour’s revival.

Notions of citizenship, rights and roles are examined by B. Beaven and J. Griffithsin ‘Urban Elites, Socialists and Notions of Citizenship in an Industrial Boomtown,Coventry, c. 1870–1914’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) which examines the emergence ofsocial citizenship schemes in Coventry. M. Thomas, ‘No-one telling us what to do?Anarchist schools in Britain, 1892–2001’ (Hist. Research, 72) deals with the libertarianschools anarchists developed.

The current intense and raging debate amongst historians of Communist history,which pits the ‘realists’, who emphasise the independence of the Communist Party ofGreat Britain (CPGB) from Moscow, against the ‘essentialists’, who stress the contin-uing influence of Moscow’s (and Stalinism) has gone a round further this year with aspate of replies and rejoinders to the Labour History Review Special Issue, volume 68,number 1 which was produced in 2003 and reported upon in the last volume. NinaFishman restates her realist’ position and replies to Alan Campbell and John McIlroyin ‘A First Revisionist Replies to Her Revisionists’ and also in ‘CPGB History at theCentre of Contemporary History: A Rejoinder to Alan Campbell and John McIlroy’(Labour Hist. R., 69). James Eaden and David Renton, ‘Comment: The Inner-PartyCritics’ focus upon the 1920s as a vital period in the history of the CPGB in which theParty depended upon Moscow even though there were many critics of the Moscowline, some of whom remained within the Party and some of whom left. A. Thorpe,‘Communist Party History: A Reply to Campbell and McIlroy’ briefly defends his‘realist’ position. And again, briefly, in ‘CPGB History at the Centre of ContemporaryHistory 2001: A Rejoinder’, Alan Campbell and John McIlroy, ‘A Reply to Critics’,provide a very useful 4,000 word article to reply to many of the criticisms that havebeen raised in the other contributions. Polemical discussion is not to everyone’s tastebut in this case anyone following through the history of the Communist Party of GreatBritain will find these short articles illuminating. Further fuel is added to this debateby G. Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism,1964–1991 (Lawrence and Wishart, 2004), the sixth and final volume in what might bedescribed as the ‘official history’ of the CPGB. Coloured by a sympathy with theEurocommunists, Andrews traces the decline of the CPGB, particularly through itsassociation with the trade union movement which itself was declining in the 1980s. Heis also of the view that the failure of the CPGB cannot be seen simply in terms of theinfluence of Moscow and feels that British communists were largely responsible fortheir own failings. At heart then this is a ‘realist’ interpretation which is, of course, whatone would expect from someone with Eurocommunist sympathies. The essentialistversus realist debate also raged in 20th Century Britain, vol. 15. A. Campbell, J. McIlroy,B. McLaughlin and J. Halstead, ‘The International Lenin School: A Response to Cohenand Morgan, challenges the article produced in volume 13 (2002) by Giden Cohen andKevin Morgan, and rejects the notion that the link between the Comintern and thenational affiliates was tenuous. Indeed, Campbell and the other authors suggest that theirwas a lasting influence upon British communism through the Lenin school. G. Cohenand K. Morgan, ‘British Students at the International Lenin School 1924–1937’: AReflection of Method, Results and Conclusion’ is as the title describes it. Pursuing other,less controversial issues, K. Hunt and Matthew Worley, ‘Rethinking British CommunistParty Women in the 1920s’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) examines the experience ofwomen in the CPGB during the 1920s and argues that many of the feelings about thechanging position of women in society were evidence within the ranks of the Communist



Party. In addition, J.L. Heppell, ‘A Rebel, not a Rabbi: Jewish Membership of theCommunist Party of Great Britain’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) suggests that theexperiences of second-generation Jews in Britain led many to join the CPGB. G. Powell,‘Turning Off the Power: The Electrical Trades Union and the Anti-Communist Crusade1957–1961’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) examines the celebrated case of the con-flict between the Communists and the ‘right’ within the ETU and places it within thecontext dictated by a Communist commitment to Moscow. J. Callaghan and M. Phythian,‘State Surveillance of the CPGB Leadership: 1920s–1950s’ (Labour Hist. R., 69)examines newly de-classified files on the surveillance of the CPGB leadership whichreveals that the public display of support for Moscow hid some internal doubts and divi-sions. J. Callaghan, ‘Industrial Militancy 1945–1979: The Failure of the British Roadto Socialism’ (20th Century Socialism, 15) examines the CPGB’s post-war industrialpolicy of wage militancy and exposes the confused rationale which led to its failure.

A.J.P. Taylor, the famous historian, once said that the two most important events ofthe inter-war years were the general strike of 1926 and the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. Both have been dealt with in impressive publications in 2004. R. Maguire,‘Reassessing the British Government’s Emergency Organisation on “Red Friday”,31 July 1925’ (Contemporary British Hist., 18) maintains that the Government prepara-tions for the threatened General Strike were not sufficient and that this was the reasonfor the nine-month subsidy to the coal industry rather than the suggestion that StanleyBaldwin, the Prime Minister, was attempting to avoid conflict and maintain consensuswithin the nation. L. Mates, ‘Britain’s Popular Front? The Case of the Tyneside Food-ship Campaign, 1938–1939’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) suggests that the whilst the popularfront against fascism failed between 1935 and 1938 it is clear that there was a potentialfor it as soon through the Tyneside foodship campaign during the Spanish Civil War.Yet the best of the lot is J. McIlroy, A. Campbell and K. Gildert (eds), Industrial Politicsand the 1926 Mining Lockout: The Struggle for Dignity (Cardiff, U. Wales P.) anexcellent collection on the seven-month coal miners’ lockout out 1926 which wasthe basis of the general strike. Unlike the general strike it has attracted very littlescholarly attention until this book which offers a collection of essays which deal withthe lockout as it operated in different coalfield m the policing of the dispute, the roleof women and the actions of the revolutionaries. There are some excellent essays here,not least those written by McIlroy and Campbell. There is also a pioneering contribu-tion by Quentin Outram on ‘Class Warriors: The Coalowners’, are rarely touched upontopic.

Feminism, Women’s history, gender and immigration Labour History Review, vol.69: 2 is a special issue dealing with ‘Working-Class Masculinities in Britain to thePresent’ edited by Eileen Janes Yeo. R. Johnstone and A. MacIvor, ‘Dangerous Work,Hard Men and Broken Bodies: Masculinity in the Clydeside Heavy Industries, c.1930s–1970s’ (Labour Hist. R., 69) deals with the way in which working in toughindustries such as coal mining iron and steel and shipbuilding industries built up andreinforced masculine identities, even to the risk of health in terms of heavy drinkingand smoking. Pat Ayers, ‘Work, Culture and Gender: The Making of Masculinities inPost-War Liverpool’ examines the shaping of masculinities in post-war Liverpool andsuggests that the restructuring of the local Labour market did little to challenge womenin the workplace or at home. A. Hughes, ‘Representations and Counter-Representationsof Domestic Violence on Clydeside between the two World Wars’ suggests that domi-nant view of working-class males beating their wives in inadequate given that there isa need to examine the situation within the middle classes and a need to recognise thatthe victims were male as well as female. E.J. Yeo, herself, has written ‘“The Boy is theFather of the Man”: Moral Panic over Working-Class Youth, 1850 to the Present’,examines the constant panic over working-class youth and its needs at fifty-year inter-vals. Karen Hunt, ‘“Strong Minds, Great Hearts, True Faith and Ready Hands”?



Exploring Socialist Masculinities before the First World War’, examines the iconogra-phy and representation of socialist masculinity in the light of the Oscar Wilde courtcases of 1895. She examines the ideas of John Tosh on the dominant characteristics ofnineteenth-century masculinity being home/independence, work and all-male associa-tions and she stresses how these ideas influences the cartoons and iconography ofsocialist groups, who often represented men as production and women as distributionand consumption. In other words, it was men, and women, who created production andwealth. Another twist is given on this subject by J. Hinton in ‘“The Tale of SammySpree”: Gender and the Secret Dynamic of the 1940s British Corporatism’ (Hist.Workshop., 58). This was a poem about a public spirited engineering worker whodemanded energy-saving activities on the shop floor in the winter of 1946/1947 whenthe fuel was running out. It stressed the need to save fuel, assumed that working menoften accepted that need but that wives often sabotaged the moves. In fact, Hintonstresses that women were just as likely as men to behave as responsible citizens.

Women’s history continues to thrive, though perhaps not in the way that it once did.J. Purvis assesses the development of women’s history over thirty years current stateof ‘Women’s History Today’ (Hist. Today, 54) discussing the work of the Journal ofWomen’s History, formed in 1989 by Christie Farman, and Women’s History Review,formed by Purvis herself in 1992. S. Todd, ‘Poverty and Aspiration: Young Women’sEntry into Employment in Inter-War England’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) examinesthe employment opportunities for women during the inter-war years.

S. Austin, ‘“A Good Job for a Girl;”: The Career Biographies of Women Graduatesat the University of Liverpool 1945’ (20th Century British Hist., 15) and P. Thane,‘Girton Graduates: earning and learning 1920s–1980s’ (Women’s Hist. R., 13) bothsuggest that highly educated women were often confined to school teaching jobs. Mostwomen did not have even these opportunities and we are reminded of this by E. Keilyand M. Leane, ‘What Would I Be Doing at Home All Day: the narrative of Irishmarried women’s working lives 1936–1960’ (Women’s Hist. R., 15) which examinesIrish women in three counties in Ireland who often combined house-bound mother-hood with part-time and, occasionally, full-time participation in the Labour market.

There has been a revival of interest of immigration from the doldrums of 2003,although it is mainly within the context of émigrés from the terror of Nazism andStalinism. D. Snowman, ‘The Hitler émigrés: the cultural impact on Britain of refugeesfrom Nazism’ (Hist. Research, 72) examines the way in which many of Hitler’s émigrésbecame journalists. T. Lane, Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus of Poles andBalts to Britain (Palgrave, £45) examines the exodus of eastern Europeans to Britainat the end of the Second World War and is drawn very largely from interviews withthose who fled eastern Europe and detailed descriptions of the brutalities of Nazi andSoviet occupation.90Original ArticleANNUAL BULLETIN OF HISTORICAL LITERATURETwentieth CenturyIX Twentieth Century

(ii) European History

R. Gerald Hughes

Reference, survey and international One of the most interesting books publishedin this area in 2004 was R.D. Anderson’s European Universities from the Enlighten-ment to 1914 (OUP, £55.00). In a wide-ranging volume, Anderson demonstrates howthe development of European universities can illuminate the societies within whichthey developed. It is certainly clear that the development of the university has beenincreasingly dominated by the inexorable rise of the state across Europe. More narrowlyfocussed, Walter Rüegg’s edited volume, A History of the University in Europe (CUP,



£85.00), is essentially concerned with how universities evolved as teaching andresearch institutions over the centuries. A good starting point for the study of Europe’s‘Age of Empire’ is provided by H.L. Wesseling’s volume, The European ColonialEmpires 1815–1919 (Pearson/Longman, £16.99). Carole Fink has produced a work onethnicity and nationalism in modern Europe with a striking contemporary resonance inDefending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minor-ity Protection, 1878–1938 (CUP, £45.00). William I. Hitchcock’s The Struggle forEurope: The History of the Continent since 1945 (Profile, £9.99) is a wide-rangingwork that is satisfying at a number of levels: whether in discussing the legacies of thetwo World Wars, or the challenges posed by European integration, Hitchcock maintainsthe reader’s interest throughout with lively and witty prose. Hitchcock’s account of thepost-war era stresses the positives in the European past and outlines exactly why hebelieves the continent can look forward to the future with no small amount of optimism.A useful companion to Hitchcock’s book is Noël O’Sullivan’s European PoliticalThought since 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99). The relative dearth of literature inthis area hitherto makes this an extremely useful work. Covering the political spectrumacross the continent, O’Sullivan offers a concise, yet sophisticated, interpretativehistory of European political thought from 1945 to the present. Desmond Dinan,Europe Recast: A History of European Union (Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99) providesthe undergraduate market with a readable history stretching back to the 1940s. PaulDukes, Paths to a New Europe: From Premodern to Postmodern Times (Palgrave Mac-millan, £17.99) sets matters in a wider socio-cultural perspective, tracing the evolutionof Europe back over the centuries. A valuable piece of social history is MarjattaRahikainen’s wide-ranging Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from theSeventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, £45.00).

Gunnar Skogmar’s The United States and the Nuclear Dimension of European Inte-gration (Palgrave Macmillan, £45.00) stresses the necessity of viewing Europeanintegration through a prism where the ‘nuclear umbrella’ remains very much in theforefront of the analysis. Guasconi M. Eleonora, L’Europa tra continuità e cambiamento:Il vertice dell’Aja del 1969 e il rilancio della costruzione europea (Polistampa, $20)analyses the Aja summit of 1969, outlining its significance and part in the the firststeps to the economic and monetary union of the EEC. Romano Sergio, Europa, storiadi un’idea (Longanesi, 15.50$) traces the ‘idea’ of Europe in an imaginative fashionwhile the collection edited by A. De Bernardi and P. Ferrari, Antifascismo e identitàeuropea (Carocci, 35.78$), argues for an identification of anti-Fascism with modernEuropean identity. The appearance of Wolfram Kaiser and Helmut Wohnout, PoliticalCatholicism in Europe 1918–1945, Volume 1 (Routledge, £20.99) and Michael Gehlerand Wolfram Kaiser, Christian Democracy in Europe Since 1945, Volume 2(Routledge, £20.99) will finally begin to redress the almost complete lack of scholarlyliterature on European Christian democracy in English.

On a darker note, Eric D. Weitz and Angelica Fenner (eds), Fascism and Neofas-cism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, £42.50)explores historical fascism and the contemporary radical right in a wide range of coun-tries from a number of different perspectives. Paul W. Schroeder draws on his manyyears of diligent scholarship to question fundamental assumptions about the interna-tional system from Napoleon to the present day in Systems, Stability, and Statecraft(Palgrave Macmillan, £42.50). Michael S. Neiberg, War and Society in Europe, 1898to the Present (Routledge, £18.99) and Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History(Routledge, £13.99) provide useful undergraduate introductory texts for the study ofwar. Similarly useful are Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott (eds), The PalgraveConcise Historical Atlas of the First World War and Martin H. Folly, The PalgraveConcise Historical Atlas of the Second World War (Palgrave Macmillan, £14.99). On adeeper level, highly recommended is the superb Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H.Herwig work, Decisions for War, 1914–1917 (CUP, £12.99). This book dissects, in



forensic fashion, the actions and motives of the powers during the First World War.If one wishes to try and emulate the great historians of the First World War thenone might do worse than to start with the comprehensive Robin Higham’s edited vol-ume (complied with the assistance of Dennis E. Showalter) entitled Researching WorldWar I: A Handbook, (Greenwood, 2003, $79.95/£45.99). Antoine Prost and Jay Winter,Penser la Grande Guerre: Un essai d’historiographie (Seuil, 9.50$) is an ambitiousbook that seeks to assess the major historiographical issues arising from the study ofthe First World War. The book’s range is undoubtedly broad and it specificallyaddresses political, military, social, economic, and cultural history. All of these are,roughly speaking, seen to have passed through three phases. The first phase occurredin the decades immediately following 1918; the second phase took place around andabout the 1960s (the Fischer debate being a notable example) whilst the third phasehas taken place over the last fifteen years or so. In addition to the ability of the authorsto make sense of the main lines of historiographical evolution, the book is of extremeutility to the student not least because of its very extensive (multilingual) bibliographyand voluminous references. N. Ferguson’s ‘Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in theAge of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat’ (War in History,11/2), demonstrates that in the Second World War, as compared to 1914–18, theextreme difficulty in turning overwhelming strategic and tactical advantage intocausing German and Japanese soldiers to surrender.

Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (Allen Lane,£25/$59.95) will further cement his reputation as one of the finest historians of twen-tieth century European history. Overy’s book is a superb piece of scholarship, offeringa systematic and detailed comparative analysis of the two most infamous dictatorshipsin history. The book is eminently readable and Overy is meticulous in demonstratingdifferences, as well as similarities, between the two systems. Gordon Martel (ed.), TheWorld War Two Reader (Routledge, £19.99) is an excellent volume that provides acomplete and up-to-date overview of the most recent historiography on World WarTwo. Max Hastings’ Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944–45 (Macmillan, £25)is a well-written and impressively researched account that slips easily between battle-fronts and between ordinary soldiers, leaders and generals in an engaging manner.Peter Davies’ Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War Two (Pearson,£19.99) offers a synthesis of the history of collaboration in the Second World War inEurope in a survey-type arrangement that undergraduate students will find user-friendly. (Actually, it’s rather surprising that no one has used Davies’ title for a bookon collaboration before now). Shlomo Aronson’s, Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews(CUP, £48.00) examines the interaction between the Nazi state, Jewish organisationsseeking to ‘rescue’ their brethren and the Allies. The subject of ‘rescue’ continues toinvite controversy but Aronson’s book demonstrates that, whatever the actions of theWestern allies, the fate of the majority of the Jews of Europe was sealed by 1942–3.Steve Hochstadt’s Sources of the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, £17.50) is a collec-tion of original Holocaust documents and sources that will give the reader greaterinsight into both perpetrator and victim alike. Dan Stone’s edited volume, The Histo-riography of the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, £90.00) provides a comprehensiveand up-to-date survey of Holocaust historiography written by some of the foremostscholars in the field globally. Nicole A Dombrowski’s edited volume, Women and Warin the Twentieth Century: Enlisted with or without Consent (Routledge, £15.99), isextremely comprehensive and wide-ranging and will, surely, become a standardteaching text. Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A History inDocuments and Eyewitness Accounts (OUP, £18.00) is an excellent teaching book withmore than enough material to provide researchers with any number of excellent leadson virtually all aspects of the global struggle after 1945. The large number of books onmemory/memorialisation is added to by William Kidd and Brian Murdoch (eds), Mem-ory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century (Ashgate, $99.95/£52.50) while the



bourgeoning academic fields of intelligence history/intelligence studies and terrorismare well served by Len Scott and Peter Jackson (eds), Understanding Intelligence inthe Twenty-First Century: Journeys in Shadows (Routledge, £18.99) and Michael Kro-nenwetter, Terrorism: A Guide to Events and Documents (Greenwood, $55.00/£31.99).Two other reference works are worthy of mention here simply for the incredibleamount of material they provide in well-organised fashion: John E. Findling andKimberly D. Pelle (eds), Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement (Greenwood,$75.00/£42.99) and Richard A. Gabriel, Empires at War: A Chronological Encyclopedia,three volumes (Greenwood, $225.00/£125.00).

France and the Low Countries Martin Evans and Emmanuel Godin, France 1815–2003 is part of series entitled ‘Modern History for Modern Languages’ aimed atundergraduates (Arnold, £12.99/$29.95) and provides an admirable introductory text.Timothy Baycroft’s Culture, Identity and Nationalism: French Flanders in the Nine-teenth and Twentieth Centuries (Boydell, $75.00/£45.00) facilitates our understandingof how regionalism and centralising nation-building have played a crucial role in theshaping of the modern French state. Barnett Singer and John Langdon, CulturedForce: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire (Wisconsin U.P., $45.00).This is a highly engaging but controversial book – spanning intellectual history, biogra-phy, the history of France and military/imperial history. Singer and Langdon argue thatwhile empire certainly had its dark side, its builders were sophisticated men whobalanced admiration for their subject peoples with an occasionally brutal hand to thosewho threatened imperial stability. Georges Connes, a French soldier, was taken prisonerat the Battle of Verdun and his A POW’s Memoir of the First World War: The OtherOrdeal, ed. Lois Davis Vines (Berg, £15.99) offers a fascinating insight into thethoughts of an internationalist and pacifist caught in the cataclysm of the First WorldWar. This is both an interesting portrait of the ordinary person at war as well as arevealing piece of social commentary on the French state at a time of terrible upheaval.

The controversies that continue to dominate the legacy of the French Third Republicare re-visited by Matt Perry, ‘Sans Distinction de Nationalité’? The French CommunistParty, Immigrants and Unemployment in the 1930s’ (European Hist. Q., 34/2) andNorman Ingram, ‘Repressed Memory Syndrome: Interwar French Pacifism and theAttempt to Recover France’s Pacifist Past’ (French History, 18/3). Bertrand Taithe’sreview article, ‘Should the Third Republic Divide us Least?’ (French Hist., 18/2),provides us with a comprehensive synthesis of recent debates on the constitutionalarrangement that lasted from the Franco-Prussian War until the Second World War andguided France to victory in 1918. Peter Jackson’s review article, ‘Returning to theFall of France: recent work on the causes and consequences of the “Strange Defeat”of 1940’ (Modern and Contemporary France, 12/4) and Talbot C. Imlay’s article ‘AReassessment of Anglo-French Strategy during the Phony War, 1939–1940’ (E. H. R.,119/481), are both essential reading for those seeking to understand the catastrophethat overtook France in 1940. Vichy is again the subject of a great deal of scholarship.Alain Decaux’s Morts pour Vichy: Darlan, Pucheu, Pétain, Laval (Pocket, 6.60$)investigates the destinies of four powerful men whose ultimate fate was superimposedwith that of the ill-fated Vichy regime (Darlan was assassinated, Pucheu and Lavalexecuted as traitors and Petain died in prison). The post-1945 years are admirablyaddressed by Michael Kelly’s Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France After theSecond World War (Palgrave Macmillan, £47.50) and Hilary Footitt’s, War and Libera-tion in France: Living with the Liberators (Palgrave Macmillan, £45.00). Footitt con-veys the chaos, uncertainty and brutality of the end of German rule in France (and thecreation of the Fourth Republic) in lucid fashion. Claudia Moisel’s Frankreich und diedeutschen Kriegsverbrecher: Politik und Praxis der Strafverfolgung nach dem ZweitenWeltkrieg (Wallstein, 42.00$) is a superb book focussing on the French efforts atbringing German war criminals to justice after the Second World War. Moisel has



managed to bridge the historiographical gap over French policy towards Nazi warcriminals and the effect of such processes upon relations with the newly establishedFederal Republic of Germany in compelling fashion. Unsurprisingly, given what weknow of history of the British and American zones of occupation, justice seems tohave made only limited headway in French-occupied Germany.

A volume based on a series of academic conferences held to commemorate thefortieth anniversary of the 1962 Accords d’Evian – Yves Michaud et al. (eds), La Guerred’Algérie (1954–1962), Odile Jacob, $23 – offers a number of excellent pieces of theAlgerian War. These include: M. Winock, ‘La France et l’Algérie: 130 ans d’aveugle-ment’; M. Vaïsse, ‘Guerre et diplomatie: victoire militaire, défaite diplomatique?’;G. Pervillé, ‘Terrorisme et guérilla: de la Toussaint rouge à la tragédie des Harkis’;J. Verdes-Leroux, ‘Les Pieds noirs’; R. Branche, ‘L’armée, la torture et la République’;M. Harbi, ‘Bilan d’une guerre d’indépendance’; H. Rousso, ‘La guerre d’Algérie dansla mémoire des Français’. Benjamin Stora has produced two fine introductory volumeson French Algeria in his Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale (1830–1954), (La Découverte,$8.50) and Histoire de la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962), (La Découverte, 8.50$).Rémi Kauffer retells one of the darkest chapters in the violent end of French Algeriain vivid fashion in his OAS: Histoire d’une guerre franco-française (Seuil, 22.50$).While this volume actually appeared in 2002, the impact of this book merits its inclu-sion here. Antoine d’Abbundo has produced a fascinating book (J’ai vécu la guerred’Algérie: 1954–1962, Bayard, 9.90$) based on the candid recollections of fourparticipants in the Algerian War: a French conscript; an FLN recruit; a Harki and aPied Noir. This is a welcome addition to this genre, of which one of the bestrecent examples is Martin S. Alexander, Martin Evans and J.F.V. Keiger (eds), TheAlgerian War and the French Army, 1954–62: Experiences, Images, Testimonies(Palgrave, 2002, £52.50).

As background text, a useful summary of political developments in the French stateis provided by Nicholas Atkin’s Fifth French Republic (Palgrave Macmillan, £17.99).Jean-Pierre Dormois’ The French Economy in the Twentieth Century (CUP, £9.99) isa very useful textbook that examines the spectacular transformation that the Frencheconomy has undergone over the past century. Maurice Vaïsse, ‘A Certain Idea ofPeace in France from 1945 to the Present Day’ (French Hist., 18/3), posits that the endof the Algerian War in 1962 actually seperated war from peace in French society. From1945 to 1962 the three big issues confronting France – Cold War, Imperial wars andthe German question – Vaïsse argues, continued to dominate the political agenda.Maurice Vaïsse, La paix au XXe siècle (Belin, $22.95) is a thoughtful work thatreflects of the fact that the arrival of the twentieth century seemed set to herald an eraof global pacifism. Yet, the cataclysm of the Great War destroyed the stability of theinternational system and the Second World War seemed to portend even greater strife.While the threat of nuclear war in the Cold War paradoxically engendered an eventual‘balance of terror’, Vaïsse raises disturbing questions regarding weapon proliferationand looming instability for the twenty first century.

In tackling the long-standing debates about the role of Gentiles in the rescue of Jewsduring the Second World War, Bob Moore’s ‘The Rescue of Jews in Nazi-OccupiedBelgium, France and the Netherlands’ (Australian Journal of Politics & History, 50/3),examines how the notion of a tradition of ‘rescue’ derived, in the case of Belgium,from the German occupation of 1914–18, and in the Netherlands from long-standingrural traditions of ‘Good Samaritanism’. Gerald Aalders’ Nazi Looting: The Plunder ofDutch Jewry during the Second World War (Berg, £16.99) is a welcome, if somewhatbelated, translation of Roof: De ontvreemding van joodse bezit tijdens de TweedeWereldoorlog (SDU Uitgevers, 1999). Aalders’ work is divided into two sections –with the first section discussing German looting in general with particular focus on theextraction of so-called ‘occupation costs’. Given the recent furore over Swiss banksand their role in the 1940s, Aalders’ book has much to tell us about the advantages of



adopting national perspectives when examining the systematic Nazi looting of Europe.Ebert Anne-Katrin’s ‘Cycling towards the nation: the use of the bicycle in Germanyand the Netherlands, 1880–1940’ (European R. of Hist., 11/3), argues that the bicyclecame to inhabit a particular place in Dutch society, symbolising an important facet ofnational identity, whilst in Germany the bicycle had long been regarded as somewhatobsolescent. For this reviewer, this revelation cast new light on contemporary refer-ences amongst Dutch football fans to the German confiscation of bicycles during theoccupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.

Italy and the Iberian Peninsula The disaster of the Sicilian earthquake of 1908 isvividly narrated by Giorgio Boatti in La terra trema: Messina 28 dicembre 1908: Itrenta secondi che cambiarono l’Italia, non gli italiani (Mondadori, 18.50$). Boatti’sbook tells us a great deal about the Italian state before the First World War as well asoffering historical and contemporary insights into perceptions of Sicily (and the Southgenerally) held in Rome and Northern Italy generally. Philip Morgan’s highly readableintroductory survey of Italian Fascism appears in its second edition: Italian Fascism,1915–1945, 2nd edn., Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99. Paul O’Brien’s Mussolini in theFirst World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist (Berg, £16.99) is a closelyargued study of Mussolini’s speeches, writings and his war diary. Contrary to the con-ventional wisdom, O’Brien demonstrates that the image of the socialist disillusionedby the experience of war is inaccurate. In actual fact, Mussolini was anti-socialist andanti-democratic by the autumn of 1914, long before Italy entered the war in May 1915.Romano Sergio’s Giovanni Gentile: Un filosofo al potere negli anni del Regime(Longanesi, 19.00$) is an interesting re-working of the influence of the neo-HegelianIdealist and self-procalaimed ‘philosopher of Fascism’, who ghostwrote the 1932 workA Doctrine of Fascism for Mussolini. J. Femia posits a fascinating, if not entirely con-vincing, case for Machiavelli as being the precursor of Fascism in ‘Machiavelli andItalian Fascism’ (Hist. of Political Thought, 25/1). Richard Bosworth is intent ondemonstrating the inherent resistance to Fascist ideology in his ‘War, Totalitarianismand ‘Deep Belief ’ in Fascist Italy, 1935–43’ (European Hist. Quarterly, 34/4). RogerGriffin seeks to put the Mussolini era in context with his ‘Italy’s Social Revolution:Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism’ (Social Hist. of Medicine, 17/1).Mussolini realised the value of football to his project as Simon Martin demonstrates inhis Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini (Berg, £50/£16.99).R. De Felice, Autobiografia del fascismo: Antologia di testi fascisti 1919–1945 (Einaudi,$13.52) catalogues the testimonies of Italians – of all backgrounds – on the Mussoliniyears. Nicholas Farrell’s Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £15.99) isto be treated with extreme caution. Signally, the author lives in Mussolini’s birthplace,Predappio – as he proudly announces on the dust jacket – and seems as determined asthe Duce’s granddaughter, Alessandra, to rescue and defend the dictator’s (deservedly)tarnished reputation.

Of particular interest for a number of historical fields of study is the illuminatingspecial issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 9/3, edited by Marta Petruse-wicz, which casts new light on Italy’s dark past in the realm of ‘war crimes’. The bestarticles in this special issue are Michele Battini, ‘Sins of memory: reflections on thelack of an Italian Nuremberg and the administration of international justice after1945’; Filippo Focardi and Lutz Klinkhammer, ‘The question of Fascist Italy’s warcrimes: the construction of a self-acquitting myth (1943–1948)’; H. James Burgwyn,‘General Roatta’s war against the partisans in Yugoslavia: 1942’ and Nicola Labanca,‘Colonial rule, colonial repression and war crimes in the Italian colonies’. This specialissue is of high quality and will be of interest to historians of the Second World War,Europe and Empire. Such issues are often re-awakened in Italy by events in theirwartime ally, Germany, and one of the signal events of post-war retribution against whatthe journalist William L. Shirer termed the ‘gangster masters of the New Order’ is



examined in Manuela Consonni’s fascinating, ‘The Impact of the “Eichmann Event” inItaly, 1961’ (The J. of Israeli Hist., 23/1). Ten members of the Italian resistance to theNazis and Mussolini’s Salò Republic between 1943 and 1945 tell their stories in G.Albanese and M. Borghi (eds), Nella Resistenza: Vecchi e giovani a Venezia sessant’anni dopo (Nuova Dimensione, 14.00$).

Chris Ross, Spain 1812–2004 (2nd edn.) forms part of the ‘Modern History forModern Languages’ series (Arnold, £14.99) and alongside Simon Barton’s A Historyof Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) is a good starting point for students of thatcountry. The new edition of Michael Alpert’s A New International History of the Span-ish Civil War (Palgrave Macmillan, £18.99) confirms its place as one of the superiorconcise histories of that conflict. Sandra Souto Kustrìn provides an illuminating insightinto the troubled society that allowed Franco the opportunity to achieve power in her‘Taking the Street: Workers’ Youth Organizations and Political Conflict in the SpanishSecond Republic’ (European Hist. Q., 34/2). An episode exemplifying the intersectionbetween the individual, the national and the international spheres in the SpanishCivil War is the subject of Josie McLellan’s ‘The Politics of Communist Biography:Alfred Kantorowicz and the Spanish Civil War’ (German Hist., 22/4). The debate as towhether Kantorowicz (a German Commuinist) was a selfless member of the Interna-tional Brigades or a Stalinist functionary is entirely representative of so many episodesof a war in which ambiguity seems to have been an almost inherent dimension. Bymeans of a close analysis of the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracyfollowing Franco’s death in 1975, Walther L. Bernecker demonstrates how and whyhistorians have slowly moved away from the notion of a Spanish Sonderweg in his‘Spaniens Übergang von der Diktatur zur Demokratie: Deutungen, Revisionen Vergan-genheitsaufarbeitung’ (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/4). Contributing to thisdebate, Jesús Millán and María Cruz Romeo pose the question ‘Was the liberalrevolution important to modern Spain? Political cultures and citizenship in Spanishhistory’ (Social Hist., 29/3). Further exploring the obfuscatory effects of the fragmenta-tion of Spanish society in the 1930s is Stephen Jacobson’s highly readable review article,‘The head and heart of Spain’: new perspectives on nationalism and nationhood’(Social Hist., 29/3).

Germany and Austria Once again, the history of Germany in the twentieth centuryhas received an almost unimaginable weight of attention from historians globally. Twoof the better surveys are: Peter Wende, History of Germany (Palgrave Macmillan,£15.99) and David G. Williamson, Germany since 1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, £18.99).Frank W. Thackeray’s edited volume, Events That Changed Germany (Greenwood,$65.00/£36.99), seeks to assess and interpret key moments in the evolution of themodern German state. The ten events selected for this useful teaching book are: ‘TheRevolutions of 1848, 1848–1849’; ‘The Unification of Germany’; ‘Industrialization’;‘The Pursuit of Weltpolitik’; ‘World War I’; ‘The Collapse of the Weimar Republic’;‘The Hitler Experience’; ‘World War II’; ‘West Germany’s, Economic and PoliticalMiracle’; and ‘The Reunification of Germany’ in 1989–1990. Ronald Speirs and JohnBreuilly (eds), Germany’s Two Unifications: Anticipations, Experiences, Responses(Palgrave Macmillan, £58.00) provides us with an interesting exercise in comparativehistory. Benjamin Carter Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justicein the Kaiser’s Berlin (Harvard U.P., $35/£22.95/$32.30) is a useful addition to theexisting social-historical research into crime in late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-tury Germany. Richard E. Frankel’s lively Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadershipand the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945 (Berg, £16.99) examines thelegacy of the ‘Iron Chancellor’ – particularly for politicians on the Right – followinghis death in 1898. The centrality of militarism in the recent German past is examinedby Ute Frevert’s study of conscription in her A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany,Military Conscription and Civil Society (Berg, £50/£16.99).



Terence Zuber, German War Planning 1891–1914: Sources and Interpretations,(Boydell, £50.00) makes available in English translation many of the documents con-cerning German war planning before 1914 that, having survived the Second WorldWar, were then locked away for over forty years by the East German state. It makes forfascinating reading and Zuber has succeeded admirably in his task of bringing theserevelations concerning late Imperial Germany to a wider audience. Thomas Boghardt’sSpies of the Kaiser (Palgrave Macmillan, £54.00) utilises new archival sources in out-lining German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era in alucid fashion. Roger Chickering’s Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918(CUP, £14.95) is an excellent volume that analyses the impact of the First World Warand all sections of German society. Maureen Healy’s Vienna and the Fall of theHabsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (CUP, £45.00/$75.00)is a genuinely superb book. As well as being a detailed history of a society at war, itis a very human book – charting the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire against thebackground of the line of the Viennese population. László Péter’s article ‘R.W. Seton-Watson’s Changing Views on the National Question of the Habsburg Monarchy and theEuropean Balance of Power’ (The Slavonic and East European R., 82/3) is an interestingpiece that charts the evolution of the views of the famous historian from a pro-Habsburg stance to his eventual embrace of the disintegration of the Monarchy basedon support for the idea of national self-determination.

One of the best general histories of Weimar Germany – Eberhard Kolb’s The WeimarRepublic (Routledge, £18.99) – appears in a welcome second edition. JonathanWright’s excellent study of the man often seen as Weimar’s best hope, Gustav Strese-mann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (OUP, £26.00) appears in paperback. Both ofthese books must surely appear on every undergraduate reading list of inter-warGermany and Europe. Raffael Scheck’s, Mothers of the Nation: Right-Wing Women inWeimar Germany (Berg, £50/£16.99/$26.95) makes an important contribution to thepolitical history of the Weimar period. Ellen Kennedy’s, Constitutional Failure: CarlSchmitt in Weimar (Duke U.P., $22.95) seeks to put Schmitt in long-term context for theconsiderable body with a renewed interest in Schmitt amongst scholars of jurispru-dence, history, political science and philosophy. The interest in Schmitt is witnessed bythe re-publication of his major works and this year sees the emergence of his Legalityand Legitimacy, translated and edited by Jeffrey Seitzer with a foreword by JohnP. McCormick (Duke U.P., $21.95). Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich(Penguin, £25.00) represents the first in his trilogy of Nuziem and it is a magnificentachievement that elegantly examines the political, social, economic, cultural andartistic dimensions of Nazi Germany. Richard Bessel’s, Nazism and War (Weidenfeldand Nicolson, £18.99) examines Nazism by concentrating on its essence – i.e. racialwar. Even the years of peace (1933–1939) were characterised by preparing for war andthis book discharges its task well written, as it is, using the latest research. Michael H.Kater’s Hitler Youth (Harvard U.P., $27.95), in defiance of the accepted wisdom, con-tends that young people were not a central concern for Hitler, which led to certainstructural and organizational weaknesses in the Hitler Youth. As a comprehensivevolume of treating children and youth growing up between the Weimar Republic anda divided Germany, Kater’s book is an excellent starting point for students inter-ested in the Hitler Youth. Two recent areas of heavy publishing activity coincide inShelley Baranowski’s excellent Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism inthe Third Reich (CUP, £40.00/$65.00) in which the author analyses the Nazi Leisureorganisation, Kraft durch Freude (KdF ) in source-rich detail (over a dozen archives areutilised).

Astrid M. Eckert, Glasplatten im märkischen Sand. Ein Beitrag zur Überlieferungs-geschichte der Tageseinträge und Diktate von Joseph Goebbels, (Vierteljahrshefte fürZeitgeschichte, 52/3) and Michael Wildt, ‘Himmlers Terminkalender aus dem Jahr1937’ (Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/4), are the result of the discovery of



fragments of Goebbels’ 1944 diary and Himmler’s daily appointments diary for 1937in the Moscow archives. The Goebbels find adds to the already extensive works of thepropaganda supremo while Himmler’s 1937 activities offer new insights into the con-struction of the SS State. Paradoxically, since historians began to realise that Nazipropaganda and post-war myth making had conspired to conceal the fact that theGestapo was a small, indeed a chronically understaffed organisation, the number ofpublished works on the Gestapo has increased dramatically. In his Die Gestapo warnicht allein . . . Politische Sozialkontrolle und Staatsterror im deutsch-niederländischenGrenzgebiet 1929–1945 (Lit, 49.90$), Herbert Wagner brings not only the knowledgeof a ‘local’ to his regional study, but the expertise of a former serving police officerand trained historian. His differentiated account stresses regionally specific ‘culturesof persecution’, and contextualises the work of the Gestapo not only in relation tovoluntary denunciation, but also to the myriad of other Nazi agencies which contrib-uted to the functioning of the Nazi terror. While Gestapo omnipresence was mythical,the widespread sense of being under surveillance was by no means without foundation,and the Gestapo’s own contribution to terror was very real. Nikolaus Wachsmann’sHitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany (Yale U.P., £30.00) demonstrates thecomplicity of thousands of ordinary civil servants in repression in Hitler’s Germanywhilst the conclusion outlines the whitewashing of the past by the Federal Republicafter 1949. In the crowded field of scholarship on Nazi medicine Paul Julian Wein-dling’s Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials (Palgrave Macmillan, £64.00) is likelyto become a reference point given its cogent and lucid exposition of the tragic manner inwhich the medical profession compromised itself in the years 1933–45. Karl Cervik’sKindermord in der Ostmark: Kindereuthanasie im Nationalsozialismus 1938–1945(Lit, 12.90$) is an efficient summary of the murder of children deemed ‘unworthy oflife’ by the Nazi state in Austria.

Adolf Eichmann is one of the most notorious figures in pantheon of Nazi evil as theorganiser of the Final Solution. His notoriety endures not only because of his appallingcrimes but, additionally, due to his dramatic abduction by Israeli agents in Argentinain 1960, his trial and execution in Israel in 1961–2 and Hannah Arendt’s superlativeEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). David Cesarani’sEichmann: His Life and Crimes (Heinemann, £20.00) is a superior example of thegenre of using a biographical approach to attempt to interpret the catastrophe ofNazi Germany. On the level of analysis by institutional means we have Harold James,The Nazi Dictatorship and the Deutsche Bank (CUP, £30.00/$40.00). In this well-writtenstudy, James notes that, in contrast to elements in the old elites – personified by Clausvon Stauffenberg – business leaders did not participate in the Resistance. By abandon-ing moral obligations and subordinating their interests to those of the state, the bankershelped to ensure the survival of their institutions at the cost of engendering a legacywhereby their role in the years 1933–45 is viewed with almost universal suspicion.Ben Shepherd’s, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (HarvardU.P., £19.95) is an innovative book that seeks to steer a middle path between the post-warWest German exoneration of the German soldier and the blanket condemnation of therecent past. Whilst in no way under-estimating the suffering caused by the Germanarmy in the USSR, Shepherd successfully demonstrates the wide variations in behaviouron the part of German officers and their soldiers – especially when they were able toexercise some autonomy in the field. Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943(Chicago U.P., £14.00/$20.00) is a harrowing eye witness account of the dreadful fateof the bombing of Hamburg (and the firestorms that followed), translated here for thefirst time some fifty-eight years after its publication in German. Produced for the sixtiethanniversary of the ill-fated ‘Hitler bomb plot’, Peter Steinbach’s Der 20. Juli 1944:Gesichter des Widerstands (Siedler, 24.00$) provides an excellent picture of the internalpolitics of Germany as national catastrophe loomed. Arthur D. Kahn’s Experimentin Occupation: Witness to the Turnabout, Anti-Nazi War to Cold War, 1944–1946 (Penn



State U.P., $45.00) is written by a former US official (in the OSS) and provides someinteresting insights although the book repeats some rather outdated assertions. Afascinating account of that catastrophe as viewed from the very heart of the Reich appearsin the shape of Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary, ed. MelissaMuller (Phoenix, £7.99). Junge was Hitler’s personal private secretary from 1942 until1945 and the book was used as a source for Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film DerUntergang (Downfall), much of which is told from her perspective. This is a fascinat-ing book and is to be recommended not least because of its depiction of an ordinarywoman living with the knowledge of intimate association with one of the most criminalregimes in history.

James C. Van Hook’s Rebuilding Germany: The Creation of the Social MarketEconomy, 1945–1957 (CUP, £45.00) engages with the debates on the post-war Wirt-schaftswunder and assesses the US contribution concluding that the West German stateitself had a high degree of freedom to shape its own destiny. A further work on thepost-war reconstruction of West Germany is provided by Armin Grünbacher’s Recon-struction and Cold War in Germany: The Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (1948–1961)(Ashgate, £50.00). Nomos’ history of the social politics of post-war Germany isindeed an ambitious undertaking (which is scheduled to appear in at least elevenvolumes plus accompanying CD-ROMs containing, literally, thousands of documents).2004 saw the publication of the eighth of these volumes – covering the GDR in thefirst twelve years of its existence (Dierk Hoffmann and Michael Schwartz (eds),Geschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945. Band 8: 1949–1961: DeutscheDemokratische Republik: Im Zeichen des Aufbaus des Sozialismus, Nomos, $169).This meticulous volume is incredibly useful for detailed study of the social historyof the GDR up to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. On a methodologicaland historiographical note, one might usefully refer here to Peter Lambert’s excellentchapter on ‘Social History in Germany’ in Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield(eds), Making History: An introduction to the history and practices of a discipline(Routledge, £16.99). Taken as a whole, this edited volume is an excellent tool forthose seeking accessible but scholarly texts for the teaching of historiography at under-graduate and postgraduate level.

Reinhard Grütz’s Katholizismus in der DDR-Gesellschaft 1960–1990: KirchlicheLeitbilder, theologische Deutungen und lebensweltliche Praxis im Wandel (FerdinandSchöningh, 58$) looks at the forgotten Christian faith of the former GDR and examinesRoman Catholics homogeneity (74 per cent of Roman Catholics in the GDR voted CDUin 1990) and their ability to survive extended state hostility after 1949. Peter Langeand Sabine Roß (eds), 17. Juni 1953 – Zeitzeugen berichten: Protokoll eines Aufstands(Lit, $19.90) documents eyewitness accounts of the abortive 1953 uprising whosecommemoration became a part of the German collective memory so soon afterwards.Alan McDougall’s Youth Politics in East Germany: The Free German Youth Movement1946–1968 (OUP, £55.00) is a meticulous work that seeks to analyse wider trends inthe GDR (and the Soviet bloc) rather than simply narrate the history of the GDR’syouth movement. Setting books such as McDougall’s in context is Catherine Epstein’sexcellent The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and their Century (HarvardU.P., £19.95). Such books provide a welcome reminder of the continuities in the history ofGerman communism all too often passed over. On a related theme we have A. Krammer’s‘The cult of the Spanish Civil War in East Germany’ (Journal of Contemporary History,39/4). In an original take on post-war Germany, Paul Betts’ The Authority of EverydayObjects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (California U.P., $50.00/£32.50) makes the case for the crucial role played by industrial design in the construc-tion of a democratic West German industrial culture to displace the unhappy legacy ofdictatorship, militarism and war. Hartmut Berghoff’s Moderne Unternehmensgeschichte:Eine themen- und theorieorientierte Einführung (Ferdinand Schöningh, $17.90) aimsto introduce a wider audience to the theory and themes of ‘modern business history.’



It succeeds admirably. A history of a German industrial giant is re-told in WernerAbelshauser, Wolfgang von Hippel, Jeffrey Johnson and Raymond Stokes, GermanIndustry and Global Enterprise: BASF: The History of a Company (CUP, £55.00).

The recent near-obsession in the Federal Republic with the post-war legacy andVergangenheitspolitik generally manifests itself again with Jeffrey Herf, ‘Politics andMemory in West and East Germany since 1961 and in Unified Germany since 1990’(The Journal of Israeli History, 23/1); Bernard Linek, ‘Recent Debates on the Fate ofthe German Population in Upper Silesia 1945–1950’ (German History, 22/3); GavrielD. Rosenfeld, ‘A Mastered Past? Prussia in Postwar German Memory’ (GermanHistory, 22/4); Jonathan Sperber, ‘17 June 1953: Revisiting a German Revolution’(German Hist., 22/4); Donald Bloxham, ‘The Genocidal Past in Western Germanyand the Experience of Occupation, 1945–6’ (European Hist. Q., 34/2). Kimberly A.Redding’s Growing up in Hitler’s Shadow: Remembering Youth in Postwar Berlin(Praeger, £33.99) is based on a large number of interviews and provides fascinatinginsights into the lives of ordinary Berliners. Kerstin von Lingen’s Kesselrings letzteSchlacht: Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, Vergangenheitspolitik und Wiederbewaffnung:Der Fall Kesselring (Ferdinand Schöningh, $35.90) deals with the indictment of FieldMarshal Kesselring as a war criminal after the Second World War. This thoughtfulbook tells us much about the manner in which the Federal Republic dealt with its Nazipast as does Bert-Oliver Manig’s book on the rehabilitation of the German soldier inthe Adenauer era between 1949 and 1963: Die Politik der Ehre: Die Rehabilitierungder Berufssoldaten in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Wallstein, 48.00$). These two booksbuild on earlier works, such as Norbert Frei’s Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfängeder Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (C.H. Beck, 1996) and Alaric Searle’sWehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament (Praeger,2003), and make a valuable contribution to the debates on memory and the past inGermany. A response to Nicolas Berg’s ‘handbook’ on the historiography of the Holo-caust (Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker. Erforschung und Erinnerung,ed. Ulrich Herbert and Lutz Raphael, Wallstein, 2003, 46.00$) by Irmtrud Wojak,‘Nicolas Berg and the West German Historians’ (German History, 22, 1), demonstratesonce more that historians do not need the ideologiocal divisons of the Historikerstreitto generate fierce debates about the German past. Y. Michal Bodemann’s thought-provoking and poignant book, A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait(Duke U.P., $23.95), focuses on the painful legacy of the Holocaust through an exami-nation of one of the surviving Jewish families that elected to stay in Germany.

Of course, the Nazi legacy is often intimately linked with the Leftist terror of the1970s and Klaus Pflieger outlines the story of the most active of such groups in hisDie Rote Armee Fraktion: RAF (Nomos, 19.80$). The life and work of Wehner vonBraun is well–known but it is after forgotten that he was part of a little-known Germanspace programme has been documented by Niklas Reinke in his Geschichte der deut-schen Raumfahrtpolitik: Konzepte, Einflussfaktoren und Interdependenzen 1922–2002(Oldenbourg, $49.80). Reinke’s book represents an ambitious attempt to cover Germanspace policy from the Weimar Republic until the present day (although the West Germanstate after 1949 looms largest in the narrative). The superb series of documents relat-ing to the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany continues with the releaseof Institut für Zeitgeschichte im Auftrag des Auswärtigen Amtes (ed.), Akten zurAuswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1973, 3 volumes (Oldenbourg,$188.00). These three volumes are of particular interest to scholars interested in German-Czech relations (as 1973 saw the completion of the main business of Brandt’s Ostpolitikwith the conclusion of an agreement between Bonn and Prague). The documentationpublished here is fascinating, particularly with regard to the question of the status ofthe Munich Agreement of 1938 (Bonn eventual successful in resisting Prague’sdemand that it be declared null and void ab initio). Surely, no respectable universitylibrary would want to be without the complete run of this wonderful research tool.



The Federal Institute for Research on the German Past in the East releases its twelfthyearbook – Berichte und Forschungen: Jahrbuch des Bundesinstituts für ostdeutscheKultur und Geschichte (Oldenbourg, 59.80$) – reporting on new projects, latest researchand the general state of play in the field. The yearbook, reflecting the division of theInstitute into the four specialist areas of history, literature/language, ethnicity, and arthistory, is particularly useful in bibliographic terms.

This year also sees the latest release of the Interior Ministry’s series on inner-German policy in the shape of Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik. VI. Reihe, Band 2:1. Januar 1971 bis 31. Dezember 1972: Die Bahr-Kohl-Gespräche 1970–1973 (Olden-bourg, $89.80) which contains a large number of documents on the accompanyingCD-ROM. The amount of official German publications is now quite incredible, grow-ing year-on-year. The cabinet minutes for 1961 are published in the volume edited byHartmut Weber, Kabinettsprotokolle der Bundesregierung, Band 13: 1960 (Olden-bourg, 49.80$). Hans Günther Hockerts (ed.), Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte inder Epoche des Ost-West-Konflikts (Oldenbourg, 59.80$) is a superior attempt tounderstand the evolution of historiography in Germany during the Cold War. DetlefJunker’s monumental two volume edited work, The United States and Germany in theEra of the Cold War: A Handbook (CUP, £130) is a must for anyone researching anyaspect of German foreign policy or German-American relations to 1990. The phenom-enon of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former the GDR – the inspiration for WolfgangBecker’s 2003 film Goodbye Lenin!) is examined in the stimulating book edited byThomas Goll and Thomas Beurer, Ostalgie als Erinnerungskultur? (Nomos, $24.00).On the other side of the coin is the study of the legal measures taken againstformer GDR border guards in Roman Grafe’s Deutsche Gerechtigkeit: Prozesse gegenDDR-Grenzschützen und ihre Befehlsgeber (Siedler, 24.90$). This is a fascinating andwell-researched book that tells us much about contemporary Germany and the legacythat continues to dog the relationship between the former East and West Germanstates. As a member of the (West) Berlin Senate declared of an unknown East Germanborder guard in the 1960’s, ‘Murder remains murder – even if one is instructed to do so!’

The Balkans and Greece Dennis P. Hupchick’s Balkans: From Constantinople toCommunism (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) finally makes a welcome appearance inpaperback. Hupchick demolishes the enduring myths of ‘centuries-old hatreds’ in adetailed and balanced history of a millennium and a half which demonstrates the richtapestry of inter-dependence woven by the interplay of Catholicism, Orthodox andIslam has been the norm in the Balkans. Hupchick’s book is a fantastic single volumehistory of the Balkan region and incredibly useful – not least because of the veryextensive bibliographies sprinkling the text. Ulf Brunnbauer’s edited volume,(Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism (Lit, 29.90$)demonstrates that, despite the social and political upheavals of the last twenty years orso, recent historiography has been characterised by a high degree of continuity. NevenBudak’s excellent piece, ‘Post-socialist Historiography in Croatia since 1990’, is ofparticular interest for its discussion of the political and national pressure that have beenregularly exerted on professional historians. Philip Carabott and Thanasis D. Sfikas(eds), The Greek Civil War: Essays on a Conflict of Exceptionalism and Silences(Ashgate, $99.95/£55.00) addresses a struggle that is curiously overlooked in Euro-pean history despite its pivotal role in shaping the Cold War and US participation inthat conflict. The book succeeds in establishing clearly the links between Greek andEuropean developments in the 1940s. An even-more neglected dimension of Cold Warhistory is addressed by Alfred J. Rieber in his ‘The Crack in the Plaster: Crisis inRomania and the Origins of the Cold War’ (The J. of Modern Hist., 76/1). Growing outof a conference of Serbian and Austrian scholars held in Belgrade in October 1996, theedited volume by Miroslav Jovanovid, Karl Kaser and Slobodan Naumovid, Betweenthe Archives and the Field: A dialogue on historical anthropology of the Balkans (Lit,



29.90$), brings together a number of interesting pieces informed by a more anthropo-logically informed history (although a couple of the pieces are rendered unreadable byworship at the feet of the post-modernist altar). Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) was themost prominent Bulgarian Communist of the twentieth century and head of theComintern (1935–1941). Drawing from Dimitrov’s extensive recounting of his frequentmeetings with Stalin in his diary, Tzvetan Todorov has produced a fascinating portraitin ‘Stalin Close Up’ (Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5/1). Todorovexploits the fact that Dimitrov meticulously recorded Stalin’s thoughts and opinionsand has records the Soviet dictator’s opinions on matters including nationalism, thebalance of power and the motivational potential of ideology.

M. Edith Durham, author of Albania and the Albanians: Selected Articles andLetters, 1903–1944, ed. Bejtullah Destani (I.B. Tauris, £49.50), was one of the last of thebreed of Victorian lady travellers, with a keen eye for detail and a perceptive politicalbrain. Echoing Leon Trotsky’s opinions, her Balkan writing betrayed an increasinglyhostile attitude towards Serbia and the Serbs. This collection makes for fascinatingreading and there is, of course an irresitable tendency to place Durham’s views againstcontemporary views of the Serbs, given the the manner in which the tragedy of Yugo-slavia unfolded in the 1990s. Sima M. Çirkoviç, The Serbs (Blackwell, £25.00) offersa rather more sympathetic picture of the Serbs stretching from the seventh century tothe present day. Carole Rogel’s The Breakup of Yugoslavia and Its Aftermath, rev. edn.(Greenwood, $45.00/£25.99) is composed of seven essays, beginning with the Tito era,tracing the demise of the Yugoslav state in systematic fashion. The book includes twochapters that focus on the aftermath of the wars of succession and the current condi-tions in the former Yugoslavia. Erik J. Zurcher’s Turkey: A Modern History (I.B. Tauris,£15.99) appears in a welcome second edition. Zurcher traces the origins of modernTurkey from the reforms of the Ottoman Empire attempted in the late eighteenth century.The book offers crucial insights into Turkish nationalism by virtue of its discussion ofthe relationship between the reforms programmes of the Ottomans, the Young Turksand Kemalism. This is very useful introductory book and has an extensive bibliographicalsurvey and a useful guide to the major figures in Turkish history.

Russia and the Soviet Union Dennis J. Dunn, The Catholic Church and Russia:Popes, Patriarchs, Tsars and Commissars (Ashgate, £50.00) is a interesting textalthough this reviewer notes that the book’s failure to examine the relationship prior tothe October Revolution might lead the reader to conclude that the Catholic Church’sproblems with Russia began with their confrontation with Communism. In reality, thetroubled relationship between the Church in Rome and between Russian Orthodoxyhad much deeper roots than the October Revolution. David Schimmelpenninck van derOye and Bruce W. Menning’s Reforming the Tsar’s Army Military Innovation in Impe-rial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution (CUP, £45.00) argues that militaryreform was an essential part of the shaping of a modern state apparatus in Russia. Thebook is also extremely useful for those seeking to understand the history of the RedArmy and its failures and successes – most notably in the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–45. St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great as his, and Russia’s, ‘window on Europe’and its first 300 years are celebrated in the lavish book by Arthur L. George and ElenaGeorge, St. Petersburg: the First Three Centuries (Sutton, £25.00) and in more soberfashion by the edited volume by Helmut Hubel, Joachim von Puttkamer and UlrichStettner, Ein europäisches Rußland oder Rußland in Europa? 300 Jahre St. Petersburg(Nomos, $36). Rex A. Wade (ed.), Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches to the Rus-sian Revolution of 1917 (Routledge, £17.99) brings together key texts to illustrate anumber of new interpretive approaches and includes a very good bibliography. Atouching book by John Van Der Kiste provides an interesting insight into what happensto history’s losers in The Romanovs 1818–1959 (Sutton, £8.99). On a related theme,Catherine Andreyev and Ivan Savicky examine the Russians who fled to the capital of



new Czech state in the wake of the October Revolution in their Russia Abroad: Pragueand the Russian Diaspora 1918–1938 (Yale U.P., £25.00).

Alexander N. Yakovlev, a key architect of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroikain the 1980s, has produced a moving survey of the twentieth century in his A Centuryof Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale U.P., £12). Erik-C. Landis has produced an interestingpiece on post-revolutionary Russia in his ‘Waiting for Makhno: Legitimacy andContext in a Russian Peasant War’ (Past and Present, 183/1). Landis argues con-vincingly that the Tambov rebellion was exceptional both in terms of its organisationand in the political programme that it supposedly represented. The re-issuing of classictexts is desirable not least because of the manner in which new generations of studentscan be disabused of the notion that the latest text is always the best. In this vein thepublication of E.H. Carr’s The Russian Revolution from Lenin to Stalin 1917–1929,with a new introduction by R.W. Davies (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) is to bewelcomed. Matthew Worley’s edited volume In Search of Revolution: InternationalCommunist Parties in the Third Period (I.B. Tauris, £45.00) consists of fifteen essaysassessing Communist prospects globally in the Comintern’s Third Period (which lastedfrom 1928 to 1935 approximately). Robert Service’s Stalin: A Biography (Macmillan,£25.00) is a weighty tome that is scrupulous in its assessment of the dictator’s life.Of course, there are gaps and great uncertainties over many aspects of Stalin’s life.Service is therefore rightly cautious and we are left to make our own assessments ofthe evidence over, for instance, the Kirov murder of 1934 and the circumstances ofStalin’s death in 1953. Stalin would surely be happy at having kept us guessing to thepresent day. The savagery and hedonistic lifestyle of Stalin and his entourage isbrilliantly captured in Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen: An AuthoritativePortrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him (Viking, £20). Rayfield’s book partic-ularly focuses on Dzerzhinsky, Menzhinsky, Iagoda, Ezhov and Beria, establishing thatthese pople were not simply ideologically driven murderers but a squalid collection ofsadists with few redeeming features. Rayfield’s is particularly effective in conveyinghow a skillful politician, with a superb intellect, was wedded to a criminality ofdiabolical cast in the person of Lavrenti Beria. This book is the ultimate antidote tocontemporary Stalin-era nostaligia in Russia.

Stanley G. Payne’s The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (YaleU.P., $35.00) is based on exhaustive archival work details and Soviet and Communistintervention in the Spanish revolution and subsequent war in Spain. Payne is particularlyexcellent on Soviet strategies, Comintern activities, and the role of the Communistparty in the Iberian peninsular until the victory of Franco in April 1939. Payne’s bookbuilds on earlier works – such as Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck and Grigory Sevos-tianov, Spain betrayed: the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (Yale U.P., 2001) –and is well deserving of its 2005 Marshall Shulman prize. Barry McLoughlin’s editedvolume, Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union(Palgrave Macmillan, £19.99) provides a systematic treatment of the terror and isespecially good in its integration of the latest historiographical developments. OlegV. Khlevniuk’s The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror(Yale U.P., £25.00), is persuasive in arguing that political motivations and paranoiaabout potential enemies contributed no more to the expansion of the Gulag than theeconomic opportunities proffered by slave labour did. Sergej Slutsch’s article, ‘Stalins“Kriegsszenario 1939”: eine Rede, die es nie gab: die Geschichte einer Fälschung’(Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/4), engages with the disputed history ofStalin’s famous 1939 speech – where he supposedly revealed the logic for his conclusionof the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Slutsch carefully traces the motives behind the deliberate his-torical misrepresentations, and unintentional misunderstandings, that have dogged thisaffair ever since. The appalling suffering of the ordinary Soviet people in the ‘GreatPatriotic War’ is conveyed beautifully in John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich’s editedvolume, Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941–1944 (Palgrave Macmillan,



£54.00). M. Aust’s article, ‘Writing the Empire: Russia and the Soviet Union inTwentieth-Century Historiography’ (European R. of Hist., 10/2), suggests that the useof imperial history as a field of comparative history in is of particular utility in con-structing Russia as a historical region.

Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk’s Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle,1945–1953 (OUP, £26.99) demonstrates the inner logic of Stalin’s planning, arguingthat his policy systematically sought to entrench the Soviet Union’s Superpower status.Having drawn upon new archives from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Wilfried Lothargues in his ‘The origins of Stalin’s note of 10 March 1952’ (Cold War Hist., 4/2),that the desire for a peace treaty over Germany was genuine on the part of the Sovietdictator. Thus the 10 March note was, in fact, a possible ‘missed opportunity’ and notsimply a device designed to obstruct German integration with the West as has beenhitherto widely assumed. The volume edited by Melanie Ilic, Susan Reid and LynneAttwood, Women in the Khrushchev Era (Palgrave Macmillan, £55.00), utilises awealth of newly released archival material and the latest secondary literature. Thebook explores a range of subjects including housing, space flight, women workers,cinema, religion and consumption. Simon Cosgrove’s Russian Nationalism and thePolitics of Soviet Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, £52.50) takes the history of a singleliterary journal, Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary), over a single decade. Thejournal was created by Nikita Khrushchev in an attempt to harness aspects of Russiannational felling and, as with so much Khrushchev planned, it turned out to be some-thing of an interesting failure. This book demonstrates the ambivalent relationshipbetween the state and Russian nationalism in the USSR; in the ultimate place theformer was dependent upon the latter whilst, simultaneously, undermining the Sovietproject it by its very articulation. The number of histories of former subject peoples ofthe Russian Empire/USSR increases year-on-year and this year sees the appearance ofRichard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, VolumeII: Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century(Palgrave Macmillan, $35/£19.99) and Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan,1905–1920: The Shaping of a National Identity in a Muslim Community (CUP, £18.99).

Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic states Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe:1939–2000 (Arnold, £12.99) offers a short, but non-patronising, introduction to thestudy of Eastern Europe. Given the current depth of ignorance about this region onecannot but applaud the appearance of such texts. Timothy Snyder’s The ReconstructionOf Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (Yale U.P., £12.50) is acomparative historical study of four modern nationalist ideologies that emerged froman essentially common medieval notion of citizenship. The cults of leadership in theSoviet Union and Eastern Europe, which flourished in the era of Stalinist dominationbetween 1945 and 1953, are analysed in Balazs Apor, J.C. Behrends, P. Jones andE.A. Rees (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the EasternBloc (Palgrave Macmillan, £50.00). In Peter D. Stachura’s Poland, 1918–1945: AnInterpretive and Documentary History of the Second Republic (Routledge, £20.99), thepopular notion that post-1918 Poland was essentially a reactionary European back-water, doomed from the outset – an archetypal ‘failed state’ if you will – is forcefullychallenged. Stachura is a long-established authority on German history and his newbook, undoubtedly written with a pro-Polish slant (but is no worse for that), will proveinvaluable for all students of inter-war Europe and not just those seeking insight intothe Polish state re-created after the First World War. The documents are incrediblyuseful in this book and Stachura brings another dimension to a number of debates oninter-war Europe. Stachura has also edited a fascinating volume on the exile enforcedby the fourth partition of Poland in The Poles in Britain, 1940–2000: From Betrayalto Assimilation (Routledge, £21.99). Anna warnowska serves up a useful article in her‘Women’s political participation in inter-war Poland: opportunities and limitations’



(Women’s Hist. R., 13/1). Anita J. Praxmowska’s Civil War in Poland 1942–1948(Palgrave Macmillan, £47.50) is a startlingly original book based on its that the Polishstate continued to find itself the victim of premise and the Soviets after, as well asbefore, the German attack on the USSR in June 1941. Praxmowska also provides uswith the eminently readable A History of Poland (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99).Andrzej Paczkowski is one of Poland’s most eminent historians and his Po’7 wiekudziejo’w Polski (PWN, 1995) has been translated (and expanded) as The Spring Will BeOurs: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom (Penn State U.P., $39.95).The understandable Polish focus on relations with Germany historically is examined inthe fascinating articles by Michael G. Müller, ‘The Joint Polish-German Commission forthe Revision of School Textbooks and Polish Views of German History’ (GermanHist., 22/3) and Klaus Zernack and Karin Friedrich, ‘Developments in Polish Scholarshipon German History, 1945–2000’ (German Hist., 22/3). Occupied Poland was theepicentre of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews and Natalia Aleksiun, ‘PolishHistoriography of the Holocaust – Between Silence and Public Debate’ (GermanHistory, 22/3), seeks to examine the legacy engendered by the Final Solution.

Ulf Brunnbauer, Michael G. Esch and Holm Sundhaussen (eds), Definitionsmacht,Utopie, Vergeltung: ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im östlichen Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts(Lit, $29.90) offers a scholarly survey of the most prominent cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’in the violent history of twentieth century Eastern Europe. Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians:A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton U.P., $19.95) is a well-written book– but it does have a number of errors and tends to concentrate rather more on the lastone hundred years at the expense of the rest of the, admittedly rather inspirational (asrelated here), story of the Hungarian people. Krisztián Ungváry’s Battle for Budapest:100 Days in World War II (I.B. Tauris, £14.95) hails from the best tradition of militaryhistory, retelling the savage battle for the Hungarian capital in 1944–5 using a wealthof primary and secondary sources. Martin Mevius successfully demonstrates how theHungarian Communists sought, and failed, to appropriate national symbols and Magyarheroes in his excellent Agents of Moscow: The Hungarian Communist Party and theOrigins of Socialist Patriotism 1941–1953 (OUP, £55.00). Johanna Granville, TheFirst Domino: International Decision Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956(Texas A&M U.P., £35.50) reminds us of the manner in which Hungary was often a merepawn after the Treaty of Trianon (as does László Borhi, ‘We Hungarian communistsare realists’: János Kádár’s foreign policy in the light of Hungarian–US relations, 1957–67’ (Cold War Hist., 4/2). In his The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Cultureand the Rise of Communism (Rowman and Littlefield, $79.00), Bradley F. Abramschallenges the conventional wisdom by denying that non-Communist forces in Czech-oslovakia fought a courageous rearguard action before succumbing to the overwhelmingforces of Communist Party organisation and Moscow-backed plotting. Abrams advancesthe idea that it was non-Communist Czechs (the study does not include Slovakia) whomeet assisted the Communist take-over by their failure to prevent the Communist partyfrom controlling the political agenda after the Second World War. Of course, asAbrams notes, the memory of the West’s betrayal at Munich in 1938 was sufficientlyfresh in these years to soften the anti-Communism of many in the Czech lands. Thebook certainly makes a convincing case on the necessity of fundamentally revising ourviews on the Communist take-over of Czechoslovakia in 1948. Knud J.V. Jespersen’sHistory of Denmark (Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99) provides a useful outline of Danishhistory of utility to the scholar and lay reader alike. Drawing extensively on oral historiesand interviews, Thomas Lane’s poignant Victims of Stalin and Hitler: The Exodus ofPoles and Balts to Britain (Palgrave, £45.00), provides a great deal of information onthe lives of Europeans in the 1940s. Berit Nøkleby’s Gestapo: Tysk politi i Norge1940–45 [Gestapo: German Police in Norway 1940–45] (Aschehoug, NOK399/c.£34) reflects the inevitable over-spill of the intense scrutiny of the Gestapo that wehave seen in Germany the last few years into the countries of occupied Europe.

IX�Twentieth Century

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