The historiography of Italian fascism has reached a curious pass. Once, especially in the English-language world, all was dominated by the study of politics, diplomacy and war. Moreover, these studies were automatically ‘intentionalist’ in their interpretation. For Denis Mack Smith as, ironically, for Renzo De Felice, it did not seem possible to think of the period from 1922 to 1945 except as ‘Mussolini's Italy’; any analysis of fascist Italy could not depart far from the dominant and dominating figure of the Duce.

During the Second World War, the black market was an integral part of daily life in all parts of wartime Europe – occupied, collaborationist, neutral – and beyond, in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Wherever nations had shifted to a controlled economy, in which supply and distribution were regulated by the government through rationing and quota systems and demand exceeded the regulated supply, the black market flourished. It was the free market at its most brutal. Prices were determined by the laws of supply and demand, adjusted to recognise and reward the enormous risks taken by suppliers in trading on the black market. It was no different in northern France.

Imre Nagy, Prime Minister during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, was above all a politician. In his frame of mind, his mentality and his actions, he largely conformed to the archetype of a ‘functionary’ that typified leading figures in the Communist movement at the time. The two main features of this mentality were belief in the infallibility of the Communist Party, and belief in the role, mission and vocation of the Party and its functionaries to redeem the world, according to András Hegedüs (member of the Hungarian Politburo 1951–6, and Prime Minister 1955–6 and a dissident sociologist in the 1960s). Another important trait of functionaries in East-central Europe was to see themselves as local representatives of a worldwide Soviet empire, not just of the Party. Although the life and personality of Nagy resembled this pattern, it departed from it in a number of ways that became dramatically manifest, most of all in his final years. One explanation for this departure lies in the ‘intellectual attributes’ or leanings of Nagy as a leading Party functionary. This side of his character prompted him to undertake an intellectual appraisal of political problems on several occasions in his life. In the period leading up to the Hungarian revolution, it made him the leading figure in an expressly intellectual movement: the opposition among the Party intelligentsia. This study is an attempt to trace the specific intellectual path taken by Nagy as a politician.

At the height of the Second World War, in November 1942, the Embassy of the USSR in Washington DC issued an Information Bulletin condemning the Nazi cultural atrocities and looting that were taking place on the Eastern Front. In conclusion, it reminded the world.

Despite the neat treaties of diplomats and precise agreements of generals, wars like the Second World War end untidily. Amidst the ruins of cities and the wash of refugees, the cessation of international hostilities gives way to the settling of domestic accounts, which in 1944–5 was called the purge of collaborators. As common and as compelling as the purge was, historians have paid relatively little attention to it. The French purge, for instance, remains somewhat of an historical enigma, in part because of the archival laws that shield the judicial records, but also in part because of the apparently obvious nature of the purge. Who cannot sympathise, even if reluctantly, with the bereaved survivors who took vengeance on the collaborator who murdered their husbands or wives, fathers, daughters or beloved friends? But such easy sympathy has misled scholarly analysis into dividing the French purge into a legal purge of court action and a popular purge of vigilante violence.

During the Cold War era the smaller states in Western Europe were confronted with numerous external pressures. These included most of all the need for closer economic co-operation within Western Europe to sustain the process of post-war economic and political reconstruction and the impact on Europe of the confrontation between the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The responses of the smaller states to these external pressures varied considerably between two poles: on the one hand, a policy of active integration, with common policies and the transfer of at least some degree of national sovereignty to common institutions, and, on the other, a policy of neutrality, either chosen freely or initially forced upon, to retain as much decision-making autonomy as possible, while safeguarding core economic interests through intergovernmental co-operation. The choice of strategy depended not only on the character and degree of the external political pressures, but also on the respective historical preconditions and on what domestic and external aims the smaller states hoped to achieve with their policies.

Since the end of the war itself, research on the German economy during the Second World War has focused – explicitly or implicitly – on the search for an explanation of the disparities in armaments and output between the first and second halves of the war. In the first half of the war, up until the winter of 1941–2, the development of armaments production was characterised by more or less stable levels of output against the background of the series of swift and successful military campaigns in Poland and in the West. This stands in stark contrast to the second half, which witnessed a radical increase in aggregate armaments output which lasted well into the summer of 1944, and which saw tank production reach 589 per cent of the level at which it had stood in January 1942, weapons production reach 382 per cent of its January 1942 level, and aircraft production 367 per cent of its January 1942 level over the same period, to name some of the most obvious successes. These increases were all the more astonishing for the fact that they were achieved against the background of a massive war of attrition on the Eastern Front which placed demands on German resources and drew male labour from German factories into the Wehrmacht on a scale out of all proportion to that experienced in the first half of the war.

Of those Hungarian intellectuals who fled abroad after the 1956 revolution, the maverick philosopher Imre Lakatos achieved the greatest prominence. In 1959, nearly three years after he reached England's shores and two years before he completed his doctorate at Cambridge, he began a brilliant teaching career at the London School of Economics and Political Science. ‘A lecture by Lakatos was always an occasion’, his colleague John Watkins has recalled, ‘the room crowded, the atmosphere electric, and from time to time a gale of laughter.’1

Writing in 1965 in Britain Looks to Germany, Donald Cameron Watt concluded:

Perhaps the biggest successes scored by the Education Branch lay in the programme of exchange visits at all levels, in the discovery and encouragement of a new generation of teachers in Germany.…and most imaginatively of all in the opening up of the Wilton Park Centre to which leaders of opinion in Germany came for short residential courses on British democratic practice. Politicians, journalists, teachers, academics, trades unionists mingle together in these courses, and so valuable did the centre appear to German opinion that it was German initiative and German financial contribution which helped to preserve it in its present form when a niggardly Treasury and a disastrously unimaginative Foreign Secretary threatened to abolish it. Its impact on German life and on the political elites of West Germany has been incalculable.

We definitely have to stop speculating about theories believed to be perfect and, instead of making deductions, we have to contribute to the construction of a positive general theory of socialism through studying economic reality.

Except for a small number of recent studies existing literature on the contemporary extreme right tends to follow a quite rigid country by country-based approach which fails to develop common theoretical perspectives. The key weakness of these specialised multi-country studies is neglect of a genuine comparative framework which often results in collections of ‘descriptive’ essays. The primary intention of this paper is to move beyond this approach and to offer a study of the extreme right in contemporary France and Britain in comparative context. This study transcends the limitations of country-specific accounts to answer the following research question: why has the contemporary extreme right in France enjoyed much more political success than the contemporary extreme right in Britain? A common conjunctural model of extreme-right political success will be constructed at the outset. This is intended to serve as a theoretical base for framing the comparison and will act as the mechanism through which the primary research question will be addressed.

In the 1960s, when I was Head of the (UK) Government Economic Service, I kept a private diary of conversations and events which has just been published. The excerpts from the diary which appear below relate to what I learned in 1967–8 about French attitudes to issues of international importance in which the United Kingdom was involved. The diary deals with four such issues: (1) the British application to join the European Economic Community; (2) the proposals to add to international liquidity through the creation of a new unit or, alternatively, of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs); (3) the British devaluation of 1967; and (4) the Bonn Conference in November 1968, at which it was widely expected that agreement would be reached to devalue the franc and revalue the mark.

In 1953 Hans Rothfels gave a definition of what he understood as contemporary history which rapidly became a classic: ‘the era of those living and its treatment by academics’. In so doing he opened up a field of enquiry to historical scholarship in Germany which had had a long tradition, but which had been almost completely excluded from the discipline since the nineteenth century. In 1821 Wilhelm von Humboldt had declared that ‘chronicling the present’ furnished the ‘necessary basis of history’, but was not ‘history itself’. This paved the way for criticism which, with Leopold von Ranke, increasingly excluded contemporary history from the sphere of academic consideration on the grounds that its typical ‘lack of reliable knowledge’ and ‘conflicts between contemporaries’ impeded objective judgement. Heinrich von Treitschke's dismissive assertion that the most recent past could only be looked at through the biased glasses of a ‘dual partiality’ was only confirmed by a new flourishing of historia sui temporis after 1914. Thus, as early as the third year of the First World War, the Historische Zeitschrift (HZ) was talking about the ‘pre-history of the World War’, thereby justifying the verdict that ‘it was practically patriotic rather than academically legitimate’. The same could be said of the notions the historical discipline put forward after 1918 against the ‘Versailles lies about war guilt’.

Khrushchev's secret speech of February 1956 threw the moral and political world of East Central Europe's intellectuals into turmoil. One of the most secure belief systems ever devised was suddenly revealed to be the ideological justification for crimes of a massive scale. Several generations of Communists groped for orientation, and radical change seemed inevitable. East Germany's intellectuals were no exception in their expectations and desires for change. Students of the GDR have always understood 1956 as one of formidable intellectual challenge to the Ulbricht regime, and the opening of SED and Stasi archives has strengthened this view, revealing an unrest that pervaded the ranks of students, writers, teachers, and much of the Party cadre.

The day of communism is done, in Europe at any rate. If Minerva's owl flies at dusk, we should now expect the appearance of works which, while conceived during the epoch of communism, have been given their sense and conclusions by the events of 1989–91. The three books considered here are the fruit not only of scholarly reflection but also of personal reconsiderations of the nature of Soviet communism. Each author recounts a story through which he has lived, with glances backwards to find the origins of an idea (in Walicki's case), an illusion (in Furet's) or a word (in Gleason's). The Marxist idea of freedom (Walicki), the appeal of the Soviet Union to Western intellectuals (Furet) and the definitions and uses of the term ‘totalitarianism’ (Gleason) are the avenues taken towards an understanding of the role of communism in this century, avenues which lead from the lives of the scholars in question. The degree of intellectual, and the kind of political, engagement with the idea of communism was different in each case, reflecting most notably the nationalities of these three historians.