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.

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.

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.

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.

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.