After more than five hundred years the political ideas of Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–c. 1476) retain the potency which has ensured that they have seldom suffered total neglect, even if much of the interest they have aroused has been ideological in character. It was perhaps only in the 1930s that Fortescue first received appropriate attention in the context of the history of political thought; and the varied consideration devoted to him by scholars over the past quarter of a century suggests that the process of appraisal is by no means complete. Despite much discussion of Fortescue's basic political categories, it will be argued here, important dimensions of his thought have been fore-shortened – notably in regard to origins, basis, and character of political society as such. Again, some of the perspectives in which the fundamental concept of dominium has been presented may be misleading if they are applied to Fortescue's use of that concept without full recognition of his specific political purposes.

Let me start by making it clear that, taken at face value, my title is entirely a piece of mischief: I am not about to disclose the fact that there were actually no learned women in Italy in the fifteenth century. Indeed, this paper is built around the careers and works of five distinguished women intellectuals of that period: Isotta Nogarola (1418–66); Costanza Varano (1426–77); Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465–1558); Laura Cereta (1469–99); and Alessandra Scala (1475–1506). There is, however, a serious point to my choice of words in the title. The point is that the ‘learned lady’ of the Renaissance (the cultivated noblewoman, beautiful, charming, gifted, ‘gentile’) has a mythic place in the secondary historical literature on humanism. From Isabella d'Este to Sir Thomas More's daughters and the English Tudor princesses, the cultivated gentlewoman is the Beatrice or the Laura of some male humanist's circle, his hi adoring pupil, his inspiration, his idol. Scholars adopt a fondly indulgent tone when discussing the women, which carries the implication that their intellectual calibre, their actual standing as scholars and humanists, is not a real issue, is perhaps not in fact of any real substance (a figment, rather, of their male admirers' or suitors' imaginations). The single scholarly piece of any significance on the life and work of Alessandra Scala concludes with typical sentimental indulgence:Her noble and elusive aspect – for no portrait of her survives, unless perhaps she smiles at us, unrecognised, in the guise of a saint or a goddess, from one of Botticelli's canvases, or that of some other Florentine artist – yet that aspect shines forth from the shadows of the past, and casts a beauteous and gracious light upon the discordant chorus of Florentine humanism at the end of the fifteenth century.

In his article ‘Semantics and historiography’, published in 1953, Richard Koebner invites historians to exploit the benefits which a semantic approach to history readily offers them. A ‘semantic approach’ he defines as a systematic ‘study of the career of political and historical expressions and slogans’. Koebner is convincing when he explains why such a study is so important – indeed indispensable – to historians who do not wish to become ‘victims of destructive ambiguities and…liable to mistake the expressions of popular historical consciousness for historical realities’. There is probably no period in history, Koebner argues, which may not be enlightened by a pursuit of these inquiries; ‘the semantic approach to history has something to reveal in all periods’

Modern British counter-espionage effectively began in April 1907, when a joint conference of naval and military officials, formed the previous year to consider ‘the Powers Possessed by the Executive in Time of Emergency’, recommended both an immediate strengthening of the laws against espionage, and a War is Office investigation of ‘the question of police surveillance and control of aliens’. These recommendations were to prove an important initiative, and did much to determine the course of British counter-espionage before 1914, yet at the time they probably seemed little more than an airing of old grievances unlikely to find new support, for they were among the last remnants n. of the abortive ‘Emergency Powers Bill’ which the War Office intelligence department had been advocating to strengthen home defence ever since the invasion scare of 1888. The 1906 joint conference had in fact hoped to further the cause of this great legislative package, with its radically new powers of access, requisition and seizure but, faced with the Liberal administration's commitment to the ‘continuous principle’ that a full-scale landing was impossible, had been forced instead to confine itself to the purely naval and military aspects of home defence. As its report confessed in April 1907, in the prevailing climate of opinion the only hope for the great ‘Emergency Powers Bill’ was as a series of ‘small and independent measures’.

David Lloyd George's behaviour in the crucial week between 27 July and 3 August 1914 has commanded much scholarship and more speculation. Nearly every member of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's Liberal cabinet, including the chancellor of the exchequer himself, has told the story of those agonizing days, by memoir, diary or letter. Yet Lloyd George's part in Britain's decision to declare war upon Germany on 4 August remains unclear; indeed it is less clear now than it seemed to be half a century ago. How could the ‘Pro-Boer’ of the days of the South African war, who had been the object of any number of dangerous personal assaults for his treasonable speeches, the enemy of the dreadnoughts, the slasher of naval estimates, indeed the man who most recently declared at the Mansion House and had asserted again in the House of Commons only six days later – the last coming on the day of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia – that powerful commercial influences in Germany and Britain were drawing the two nations so close that great arms were unnecessary, how could such a man become the supporter of intervention in a continental war on behalf of France?

In his recent book, French war aims against Germany, 1914–1919, David Stevenson comes to the heart of the problem relative to the diplomatic prolongation of World War I. ‘No Government’, he asserts, ‘was willing to jettison its war aims in the interest of a compromise peace, or to place itself at the enemy's mercy while a chance of victory remained’. His work is to be applauded, therefore, for he has given us the first succinct and judicious account of the course of official French war aims from 1916 to 1919, enlarging upon a topic heretofore treated in scholarly articles. Using the wealth of archival documentation now available, and the private papers of numerous participants, Stevenson has made a major and much-needed contribution to our knowledge of the subject by tracing the relationship between official war aims policy, peace diplomacy and the diplomatic impact of allied policy on French war aims from their inception to the Versailles settlement.

R. A. Butler has been one of the outstanding figures in twentieth-century British politics. After his death The Times described him as ‘the creator of the modern educational system, the key-figure in the revival of post-war Conservatism, arguably the most successful chancellor since the war and un-questionably a Home Secretary of reforming zeal’. His record of achievement was unequalled by his rivals in the contests for the party leadership in 1957 and in 1963, but on both occasions the leadership eluded him. How and why this happened was understandably of the greatest interest to those who reviewed Rab's memoirs, The art of the possible, which were published in 1971. These memoirs won unanimous praise for their literary excellence, but otherwise met with a rather mixed reception. Enoch Powell, one of Rab's supporters in 1963, described them as ‘a work of astonishing self-revelation [belonging] with the classic Confessions. Augustine and Rousseau were not more unsparing of themselves than Rab…’ The ‘large episodes’ of Rab's career, Powell went on, ‘are treated with a generous vision (including, it need not be added, a generosity to Rab) which leaves the reader with improved understanding and perspective’. Powell's comments were echoed by others on the Right, but the Left was more critical. Anthony Howard noted that ‘what tend…to get wholly left out are the mistakes and blunders’ – the now infamous Villacoublay meeting during the Suez crisis; and Rab's astonishing admission to the journalist George Gale during the 1964 campaign that the election was slipping Labour's way. Harold Wilson, who had offered Rab the mastership of Trinity, was perhaps the least charitable of all. He found The art of the possible disappointing because, he claimed, Rab underwrote the great occasions. Rab's reticence about Suez, however, upset Wilson less than the description of his tribulations at the hands of Labour MPs as government spokesman for the policy of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War. Here was an issue which could excite the older soldiers of the British Left, and if Wilson was alone among Rab's reviewers in making more than passing reference to Rab's association with appeasement this was why.

There are several points in post-war history at which, it is argued, Britain lost an early opportunity to enter the European community. The refusals to join the Schuman Plan and Messina deliberations in the 1950s, and the failure of the E.E.C. applications of Macmillan and Wilson, are most commonly mentioned. But some commentators have pointed to another ‘missed opportunity’, following Winston Churchill's return to Downing Street in October 1951. For, in opposition, Churchill had seemed a great exponent of European unity, and several of his ministers – foremost among them the home secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, and housing minister, Harold Macmillan – had shown great enthusiasm for his ideas. Hopes that Churchill's government would favour a more positive approach to European unification were quickly disappointed, however: within weeks the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had ruled out any direct British role in Europe's emerging ‘supranational’ institutions, and in 1952 he defeated some determined efforts by Macmillan to change his policy. The ‘pro-Europeans’ did not forget this ‘betrayal’, however. They argued that a real opportunity to take the leadership of Europe had been lost and in the ensuing years, as Britain's failure to join the European community became more generally criticized, their thesis seemed credible. An examination of the evidence, however, allows a very different picture of this ‘missed opportunity’ to be painted.