The Egyptian experience of the Suez crisis and subsequent conflict of 1956 has received significantly less treatment than those of the other major players, Great Britain, France, Israel, and the United States. The consensus over Egypt's role in the crisis has, moreover, has advanced very little from the narrative put forward by official participants at the time, portraying the event as a landmark in a nationalist struggle to restore Egypt's independence and national dignity. This article takes a fresh look at the Suez crisis from the perspective of the figures of an emergent Egyptian political opposition in 1955–6, whose responses differed substantially from this received view. By bringing domestic Egyptian political struggles to the foreground of this international crisis, the article will offer a more nuanced view of the origins of Suez in British planning, and of its significance for contemporary Egyptians. The conclusion will seek to explain how a collection of sometimes extreme nationalists could take such a counter-intuitive position in the Suez crisis through exploring the diversity of nationalist thought in the Egypt of the 1950s.

This paper assesses the historical validity of the famous tale that, near the beginning of the Greek War of Independence (1821–32), the Hellenic revolutionary army offered lead ammunition to their Ottoman enemies who they were besieging on the Athenian Acropolis. This gift was presented to the Turks in an effort to halt their quarrying of the Parthenon and the other classical monuments on the hill-top, within the masonry of which the Ottoman defenders were searching for the ancient lead clamps which could be melted down and recast into ammunition. This paper will, however, demonstrate that there is a lack of contemporary evidence to support the tale and the earliest recorded references to the story only occur some four decades after the event was claimed to have taken place. Yet despite this lack of eyewitness evidence, from the early 1980s onwards, the tale has been frequently passed off as historical fact and referenced with regularity by campaigners lobbying for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

This article examines surviving notes from interviews conducted by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in the London Borough of Bethnal Green and the Essex ‘overspill’ estate of ‘Greenleigh’ (Debden) in the mid-1950s to ask how far they support the central arguments about kinship, community, and place advanced in their classic 1957 book Family and kinship in East London. These interviews are used to suggest that Young and Willmott's powerful a priori models about ‘community’ and working-class kinship, and their strong political investment in the idea of a decentralized social democracy based on self-servicing, working-class communities, led them to discount testimony which ran counter to their assumptions as ‘aberrant’ or ‘exceptional’. Though it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from thirty-seven interviews, it is suggested that the snippets of personal testimony that survive in Michael Young's papers reinforce the arguments of historians who seek to question cataclysmic accounts of the consequences of working-class suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Family and kinship would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green's family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.

Citizenship has been widely debated in post-war British history, yet historians discuss the concept in very different, and potentially contradictory, ways. In doing so, historians are largely following in the footsteps of post-war politicians, thinkers, and ordinary people, who showed that citizenship could – and did – mean very different things. The alternative ways of framing the concept can be usefully described as the three registers of citizenship. First, there are the political and legal definitions of what makes any individual a citizen. Secondly, there is the notion of belonging to a national community, an understanding of citizenship which highlights that legal status alone cannot guarantee an individual's ability to practise citizenship rights. Thirdly, there is the idea of citizenship as divided between ‘good’ or ‘active’ citizens, and ‘bad’ or ‘passive’ ones, a differential understanding of citizenship which has proved very influential in debates about British society. This article reviews these registers, and concludes by arguing that all three must be taken into account if we are to comprehend properly the nature and citizenship as both status and practice in post-war Britain.

A widespread trend in Enlightenment studies is to emphasize the particular ‘national contexts’ within which key ideas were disseminated and appropriated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This may be one way to read the three books under review: on one level they appear to look at how three emblematic figures of Modern Greek Enlightenment (Adamantios Korais, Iosipos Moisiodax, and Veniamin Lesvios) transmitted ideological and philosophical tenets of Western modernity to the non-Western context of a country under construction: nineteenth-century Greece. Yet there is much more at work here. On closer study, these books collectively take an important step by suggesting a reversal of perspectives. The desideratum is an approach that no longer considers the Modern Greek Enlightenment (roughly extending from 1760 to 1821) as an a priori peripheral and dependent movement, but rather as a vehicle for elaborating on aspects of the Enlightenment as a transcultural phenomenon. Seen in this light, the space of the Modern Greek Enlightenment is not primarily geographical or geopolitical, but cultural and intellectual. Owing to the fluidity of borders and the mobility of intellectual agents inherited from the Ottoman imperial structures, the impact of the Modern Greek Enlightenment stretches across a vast area from south-eastern Europe to Asia Minor and from Transylvania to Kydonies. Interestingly, the same is true of the ideological and religious opponent of Enlightenment intellectual constellations in the Balkan peninsula: Orthodox Neo-Palamism. This spread from Mount Athos to Romania, offering a competing version of transnationalism and illumination with roots in Hesychast theology, rather than in the West. The emerging tension tested the application of Enlightenment ideas in ways alien to the West and shaped the outlook of intellectuals who are perhaps little known, but who merit a unique place in the broadly construed canon of Enlightenment thought.

This article presents an overtly atheistic text from the early eighteenth century that has hitherto been completely unknown. It survives in manuscript in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, to which it was presented in 1841, and is claimed to be the work of the Scottish medical theorist, satirist, and poet, Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713). Here, its links with Pitcairne and his milieu are assessed and its content evaluated, in conjunction with the provision of an annotated edition of the text itself.

The character of eighteenth-century English society remains a subject of debate, and diverse perspectives are particularly pronounced when it comes to the cultural influence and power of politeness. The monographs discussed below all engage with politeness in different ways. Emma Major and Sarah Apetrei explore the means by which polite culture facilitated female cultural agency, and thus follow Lawrence Klein's call to comprehend the lived experience of politeness. Taking a different tack, Simon Dickie and Vic Gatrell reject the idea that politeness enjoyed the cultural dominance ascribed to it by Klein and other historians. In Ildiko Csengei's study, the narrative of an emergent civility is challenged through an analysis of sensibility's ‘darker side’. This move towards an acceptance of the power of the impolite in British culture is also explored by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, who emphasizes the power of the liberated male libertine, and broadens the scope for understanding eighteenth-century culture. Yet, an abandonment of politeness risks removing women's agency from the picture, with Major, Apetrei, and Karen O'Brien all emphasizing the importance of the feminine to politeness and virtue; in O'Brien's case, in the context of Enlightenment concepts of civility, where the feminine symbolized progress and refinement.