The attempt to identify a ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ has not perhaps involved sufficient attention to ecclesiastical history. Yet isolated remarks have already revealed historians' appreciation of religious phenomena common to England and to the continent, to Protestant as well as to Catholic Europe. The application to Laudian England of the concept of ‘Puritanism of the Right’ has not failed to suggest a comparable view of some aspects at least of the European Counter-Reformation. A common interest has been detected between Venetian erastianism and Dutch Counter-Remonstrant Calvinism.

‘Since I have ascended the throne, and wear the first diadem in the world, I have made philosophy the legislator of my empire.’ Of all the sayings attributed to the Emperor Joseph II, this is easily the most hackneyed. It figures in many surveys of eighteenth-century history, whether old like W. O. Hassall's and A. H. Johnson's or new like those by Stuart Andrews, Maurice Ashley, R. W. Harris and E. N. Williams; in what is regarded as the best biography of Joseph in German, by Viktor Bibl; in the most extended and best known Life in English, Saul K. Padover's The Revolutionary Emperor; in Herbert H. Rowen's collection of documents, From Absolutism to Revolution; in Albert Sorel's L'Europe et la Révolution française; in Victor-L. Tapié's The Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy; and in the recent monograph by Walter W. Davis, Joseph II: An Imperial Reformer for the Austrian Netherlands. The remark is the first sentence of a letter which the emperor is supposed to have written to Cardinal Herzan, his minister in Rome, in October 1781, and which goes on:

The Eastern Question is a hardy perennial in historical research and writing. Years, indeed generations, of study seem to leave basic issues unresolved. One of the most persistent of those issues is the role of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador at Constantinople, in the outbreak of the Crimean War. Temperley may have been exaggerating when he said it had long been a popular belief that Stratford ‘was the human agency which caused the Crimean War’ – a belief he spent some time in efforts to dispel – but that Stratford was less than helpful in the pursuit of a peaceful solution to the 1853 crisis was certainly a widely held belief at the time and has proved an enduring one. As late as 1966, M. S. Anderson, dealing with the question of Stratford's ‘guilt’, once more could only conclude: ‘Whether Stratford de Redcliffe, as has often been alleged, privately urged the Turkish ministers to reject the [Vienna] Note while publicly advising them to accept it, is uncertain.’ The Vienna Note was the settlement of the Russo-Turkish conflict proposed jointly by the Governments of England, France, Austria and Prussia and accepted in toto by the Tsar. There was, however, no lack of certainty in the minds of the British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Clarendon, and the first lord of the admiralty, Sir James Graham, that Stratford had been an agent provocateur. On 3 September Greville wrote: ‘Clarendon thinks that Stratford has encouraged the resistance of the Divan to the proposals [at Vienna] and that he might have persuaded the Turks to accept the terms if he had chosen to do so…’

John Morley, a son of Blackburn, wrote of the Lancashire of the 1860s; ‘as a rule in the cotton districts where the trade relations between master and man have been … established on a satisfactory basis, the man, in the truly feudal spirit, takes part with his master, and wears his political colour. This current of things … “esprit de corps” interesting the employed in the triumph of this mill over that, is not likely to change immediately nor for a long while to come’.

Not much is generally known about the career of Sir George Sydenham Clarke as first secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence other than his arrival at Whitehall in 1904 and his departure under something of a cloud three years later. Yet Clarke's career is in many respects worthy of study. He can lay strong claim to being the first defence ‘bureaucrat’, and as such his career served to establish a pattern into which his successors had to fit themselves. His activities during his three years of office do much to illuminate the methods by which strategic decisions were reached and demonstrate the obstructions that beset the professional civil servant in such a milieu. The influence of the committee which he served has been the subject of considerable analysis and comment; Clarke's personal disposition helps to explain die remark of one scholar that, for a body occupying its influential position, the CID achieved relatively little.1 Finally, the manner of Clarke's going illustrates the political strength of the navalist lobby and of Sir John Fisher at a crucial time in the making of defence policy.

In Second Class, there was only my valet and two Italians on their way to Valona to buy from a Greek a wood, which, as far as they knew, did not belong to him. A frequent matter in the East

So sardonically wrote in his diary a second-rank Italian politician, the only passenger in first class, voyaging in 1902 across the Adriatic to Albania. The politician was Antonino di San Giuliano. His diary had a purpose, as it was destined to be published in Giornale d'Italia, Rome's new conservative daily. This paper had been founded only a year before by Alberto Bergamini and Sidney Sonnino in an effort to regroup those anti-Giolittian politicians scattered by the failure of the second, authoritarian, Pelloux ministry.

At the close of his article on ‘The East Fulham By-election, 25 October 1933 C. T. Stannage was allowed extra space to attack the account of the 1933–5 by-elections given in K. Middlemas’ and J. Barnes’ Baldwin, to re-state the charge that Baldwin deceived the country at the 1935 general election over the need to re-arm, and to suggest that there was no essential difference between the government's position on rearmament and that of the Labour opposition. It is not my wish to rush to the defence of Messrs. Middlemas and Barnes (who are no doubt capable of looking after themselves). But Dr Stannage's account of the rearmament controversy seems over-simplified. And, as it has been accepted uncritically by no less a figure than Henry Pelling, it may be worth looking at the question in rather more detail.