Letters are a literary resource often under-estimated by scholars. Sackville's letters from France, to Thomas Heneage and Elizabeth I, demonstrate how the application of literary means, guided by a partial viewpoint, creates the circumstances in which the political management of actuality can occur. These letters are generally known only from extracts and digests in calendars, which give no hint of their literary forms and styles. No one has yet commented on the significance of their rhetorical tactics. The full context of the correspondence shows Sackville exploiting existing relationships with Heneage and the queen to build up good will and credibility for himself as a lively and judicious personality. In particular, the previously unpublished representation of his secret interview with Catherine de Medici exploits the actuality of dramatic dialogue far beyond the normal use of so-called verbatim report in diplomatic correspondence. This representation raises questions of how far Sackville interpreted what he heard and why. The opportunity to compare Catherine's account of their meeting with Sackville's shows him selecting and emphasizing certain details, while suppressing others, in anticipation of his reader's response.

This article explores the Jacobean oath of allegiance as an act of government. It suggests that historians have misread the intentions of the regime in its formulation and enforcement of the oath. Consequently they have underestimated the capacity of the regime to enforce its will on catholic nonconformists. An analysis of contemporary reaction to the oath demonstrates that early modern government could exert its power in ways which revisionist historians have either missed or denied. The oath should be understood as an exceptionally subtle and well-constructed rhetorical essay in the exercise of state power, and this we see in the devastating effect it had on the structure of Jacobean Romanist dissent. The evidence presented here suggests that this statutory oath was not a simple profession of civil allegiance to which English Romanist dissenters responded with a characteristic mixture of paranoia and politically illiterate confusion. Rather it was an exceedingly complex association of religious and political ideas, a diabolically effective polemical cocktail, which did not have to rely merely on the mechanics of a bureaucracy to work its intended course against the Romanist fraction within the English state.

It is commonly asserted that people were hanged at Salem on charges of spectral appearance; and the way to avoid hanging was to confess. Non-spectral acts of witchcraft are regarded as inconsequential to the outcome of the trials. Yet it was the non-spectral acts which provided the one magnet that attracted attention from the court. No one charged only with spectral appearance was even tried. The reprieves granted to confessors were the last decisions the court was allowed to make. This profile provides evidence that the standard claims about the court of oyer and terminer's use of evidence are the reverse of what actually happened, and highlights a number of patterns that have gone unremarked, requiring fresh interpretations.

O'Connell's relationship with Jeremy Bentham is the subject of frequent comment. However, the nature of this relationship has never been adequately documented, largely because the principal documentary evidence – their correspondence – remains uncollected. As a result, there exists a lacuna in the literature relating to O'Connell's involvement with British radicalism. This essay reconstructs the nature of his political alliance with Bentham from the evidence provided by their correspondence, from 1828 to 1831. It begins with O'Connell's plausible professions of discipleship and their shared optimism about the radical reform agenda, through to Bentham's concerted efforts to bind O'Connell to the British radical movement, and ending in the disillusionment and division that arose from O'Connell's insistence on giving priority to Irish reforms and Bentham's deep suspicion of catholicism. The whole is illustrative of Bentham's efforts in his later years to implement his policies through the agency of presumed ‘disciples’.

This article examines the attitude and policy of Lord Malmesbury in regard to the growing Italian crisis of 1858–9. Making use of previously unavailable archival material (in particular the private papers of Malmesbury himself) it seeks to present a much fuller picture of tory Italian policy than has, until now, been possible. Although it is recognized that Malmesbury's Italian policy was based upon a sincere desire for peace, this does not explain why Malmesbury chose to hold Cavour personally responsible for the Italian crisis and directed his peace efforts not at Paris but at Turin and Vienna. This had much to do with Malmesbury's close personal links with the French emperor, Louis Napoleon. In addition, this article challenges the traditional view of Sir James Hudson as ‘more Italian than the Italians’. Hudson was not prepared to support Cavour in a course of action which promised only to deprive Piedmont of her constitutional freedoms and deliver Italy into the hands of France.

During Italy's ‘two red years’ (1919–20), left-wing catholics challenged the authority of the church and the landowners in large areas of northern Italy. Calling themselves the estremisti (the extremists), left catholic unions organized peasants and workers in land and farm occupations and encouraged a series of radical strikes. Left catholic leaders became national figures, in particular Guido Miglioli at Cremona and Romano Cocchi at Bergamo. This article examines these innovative struggles and their troubled relationship with the traditional socialist Italian left during this turbulent period. No alliances were formed between the estremisti and the ‘red’ unions until 1921–4, when fascism was already rampant and the revolutionary wave had already subsided. The article analyses why alliances were not built earlier, and why the socialists were so hostile towards the catholic left. Both the theory and the practice of the traditional left prevented any positive appraisal of the estremisti. In addition, there are detailed accounts of the extraordinary mass movements inspired by Cocchi and Miglioli in some of the richest and most staunchly catholic regions of northern Italy.

Bob Smillie, a volunteer with the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) contingent in the Spanish Civil War, died while held prisoner by the Republican side in Valencia in June 1937. His death, officially due to appendicitis, has been consistently treated as suspicious, not least by his comrade-in-arms George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. This article re-examines the circumstances surrounding Smillie's death, using the papers of the I.L.P. businessman David Murray who was in Spain attempting to secure his release. Murray accepted the ‘official version’ of Smillie's death by natural causes – and defended it doggedly within I.L.P. circles – despite those who advanced views to the contrary. The article examines Murray's evidence in reaching his conclusions, and concludes that the I.L.P.'s response to Smillie's death reveals much about its precarious position within British politics in the late 1930s.

The Plowden committee on the control of public expenditure has been described as a milestone in the modernization of postwar British government. Certainly it effected major changes in both the Treasury's structure and personnel and, by securing the establishment of the public expenditure survey committee, gave subsequent governments the opportunity to plan public expenditure rationally in relation to prospective resources. Ultimately, however, the committee was a failure. The civil service was re-examined by the Fulton committee within five years and public expenditure soon escalated out of control. The Plowden committee thus represented a major lost opportunity. The time had been ripe for a fundamental political and administrative adjustment to the needs of the extended postwar state; but the committee failed to build the necessary political, parliamentary or public support for its recommendations. The reason for failure was its restricted nature as an internal enquiry with largely ineffectual ‘outside’ members, which enabled vested Treasury interests increasingly to dictate its deliberations. A more open enquiry would have stimulated and brought the best out of the ‘modernizers’ within the Treasury. The committee, therefore, proved to be not an administrative milestone but a prime example of how British institutions, under the guise of reform, have traditionally deflected criticism, truncated discussion and thereby stifled the fundamental reforms required to halt Britain's decline. In relation to welfare policy, the committee failed to examine the relative efficiency of collective provision in given policy areas, opposed contracyclical demand management and covertly sought to cap welfare expenditure. In short, it accepted the electoral necessity but not the legitimacy of the welfare state.

In a letter to Erasmus dated 3 September 1516, Thomas More wrote: ‘I am sending you my “Nowhere”, which is nowhere well written’. More's use of the Latin word ‘nusquam’ in this sentence (not ‘Utopia’, as one might have expected) made explicit what would have been apparent to any reader of the book with a knowledge of Greek: that the island of Utopia which the character Raphael Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’. The name ‘Utopia’, those readers would have known, was a compound of the Greek adverb ‘ou’, meaning ‘not’, with the noun ‘topos’, or ‘place’. The non-existence of Utopia operates throughout the work as a joke with at least two dimensions. On one level, the story Hythloday tells is ostensibly presented as fact, whereas humanist readers with a knowledge of Greek would have known it to be fiction. But additionally, Hythloday's argument (against the objections to communism voiced by ‘More’) that communal living really does work in Utopia is ironically undercut by the fact that Utopia is nowhere at all. Why More should choose to make this second joke is in a way the most fundamental question for the interpretation of Utopia, for if we do not understand why More thinks it is important that the commonwealth Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’, we will not be able to understand what More is doing in the work as a whole.

One of the more absorbing events in the great drama of the Popish Plot, which swept through English political life in the autumn of 1678, was the discovery of the corpse of a Westminster magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, in a ditch near Primrose Hill on 17 October 1678. This event, which sparked off a great deal of panic in London and gained some notoriety at the time, has continued to perplex historians, both professional and amateur, ever since. The speculation as to how Godfrey met his death and who did the deed, has tended to obscure the fact that we still know surprisingly little about this prominent Westminster merchant and justice of the peace before his demise. Despite an intensive historical investigation of Godfrey's murder, if murder it was, a lack of evidence has always been the main problem for any historian attempting to analyse Godfrey's character and career prior to his death. This was compounded by the allegation that on the night before his disappearance Godfrey burnt a large number of his personal papers. However, located in the collections of the National Library of Ireland is a small white leather-backed volume containing seventeenth-century copies of the correspondence of Sir Edmund Godfrey to his close friend the Irish healer and stroker Valentine Greatrakes. This letterbook is a significant addition to the historical record in that it contains what may be the only surviving personal letters of the ‘murdered’ magistrate during the late 1660s and early 1670s.

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

Absolute monarchy and the Stuart constitution. By Glenn Burgess. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. ix+229. £25.00.

Henry Parker and the English civil war. By Michael Mendle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xix+204. £35.00.

Classical humanism and English political thought, 1550–1640. By Markku Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+356. £35.00.

Republicanism, liberty, and commercial society, 1649–1776. Ed. David Wootton. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. ix+497. £40.00.

Negotiators of change. Historical perspectives on native American women. By Nancy Shoemaker. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. 1 + 236. £13.99

Deadly medicine. Indians and alcohol in early America. By P. C. Mancall. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. viii + 268. $29.95

The American Revolution in Indian country. By C. G. Calloway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. vii + 327. £40.00

Women's work, men's work. The informal slave economies of lowcountry Georgia. By Betty Wood. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Pp. ix + 247. $45.00

Power and everyday life. The lives of working women in nineteenth-century Brazil. By Maria O. Silva Dias. Oxford: Polity Press, 1995. Pp. v + 221. £12.95

Japan through American eyes: the journal of Francis Hall, Kanagawa and Yokohama, 1859–1866. Edited and annotated by F. G. Notehelfer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. 652. £39.00.

Sabotaging the shogun: Western diplomats open Japan, 1859–69. By John McMaster. New York: Vantage Press, 1992. Pp. 201. $16.95.

Japan and the world since 1868. By Michael A. Barnhart. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Pp. 198. £40.00 hbk: £13.99 pbk.

The abacus and the sword: the Japanese penetration of Korea, 1895–1910. By Peter Duus. Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. 480. £37.50.

Race and migration in Imperial Japan. By Michael Weiner. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. 278. £37.50.

Voluntary death in Japan. By Maurice Pinguet. Oxford: Polity Press, 1993. Pp. 365. £45.00.

Shōwa: the Japan of Hirohito. Edited by Carol Gluck and Stephen R. Graubard. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Pp. 315. £8.95.

Arming Japan: defence production, alliance politics, and the postwar search for autonomy. By Michael J. Green. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Pp. 206. £30.00.

The technological transformation of Japan: from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. By Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 304. £35.00.

The emptiness of Japanese affluence. By Gavan McCormack. Armonk, New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Pp. 311. £16.95.

The French Republic, 1879–1992. By Maurice Agulhon. Translated by Antonia Nevill. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Pp. 500. £45.00.

The republic of De Gaulle, 1958–1969. By Serge Berstein. Translated by Peter Morris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. 281. £30.00.

Louis Loucheur and the shaping of modern France, 1916–1931. By Stephen D. Carls. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Pp. 416. £42.75.

The French secret services. By Martyn Cornick and Peter Morris. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1993. Pp. 136. £31.50.

De Gaulle and twentieth-century France. Edited by Hugh Gough and John Horne. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Pp. 192. £13.99 pbk.

Nazism and German society. 1933–1945. Edited by David F. Crew. (Rewriting Histories.) London/New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xi + 316. £11.99.

The Holocaust and the liberal imagination. A social and cultural history. By Tony Kushner. (Jewish Society and Culture.) Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Pp. xx + 366. £14.99.

The Zionist ideology. By Gideon Shimoni. (The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series, 21.) Hanover/London: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi + 506. £46.95.

American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust. By Melvin I. Urofsky. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Pp. xv + 538. $15.00.