It has always been tempting to assume, like the ancient Roman, that diplomacy falls silent amidst the clash of weapons. This was never entirely true. It was certainly not so during the opening, largely European, phase of the Second World War, as The Foreign Office's War, 1939–41 demonstrates in masterly fashion.

It brings fresh light into a period still overshadowed by the Churchillian myth, culminating in the belief that the years 1940–41 were the nation's ‘finest hour’. This belief has left an indelible imprint on national mythology. It has also coloured the historiography of that period. When, in the early years after the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote his six-volume history of the conflict, he established the framework for analysis that has retained much of its interpretative dominance largely undiminished. In the Churchillian version of events, the period from the outbreak of war to 1941 was one in which Britain's failure to arm in the 1930s, against Churchill's advice, inevitably led to the period of the ‘phoney war’, followed with equal inevitability by the fall of France in June 1940. After this, Britain and the Empire ‘stood alone’. The Royal Air Force – ‘the few’ – provided for the air defence of Britain – ‘the many’. On the oceans, the Royal Navy attempted to ensure that the sea lanes remained open to British commerce. On land, the army provided for home defence, fought in North Africa and kept Egypt safe from Italian attacks. This period of ‘Britain alone’ – the country's ‘finest hour’, so brilliantly captured by David Low's famous cartoon and by Churchill's equally brilliant rhetoric – ended in 1941 with the German attack on the Soviet Union and the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. Together they ushered in the period of the ‘Grand Alliance’.

Missing from the Churchillian analysis is the fact that the period from 1939 to 1941 was the most complicated and important portion of the war with respect to British diplomatic activities. This is of particular importance. During and after the First World War, the Foreign Office had been criticised for its activities. It had not, the critics alleged, either added to Britain's allies by bringing neutrals over to the side of the Entente or prevented neutrals from joining the Central Powers.

The work of a historian is never done. The very nature of history ensures that this is so. Past events are not frozen in time. Evidence pertaining to them is never complete, hardly ever incontrovertible, and so capable of often sharply contrasting interpretations. Rooted in the present, the historian watches the object of his studies recede, steadily and ineluctably. All he can do is to dig further, probe more widely and ask different, yet more searching questions to retrieve a little more of the past, its complex and changing contexts, always knowing that, ultimately, it will elude his grasp. When discussing such matters, Keith Neilson was fond of quoting Günter Grass, the German novelist, who in his memoir of his own uncertain past likened interrogating it to peeling an onion. He argued ‘that “when pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.”’ Keith thought ‘that we should take this advice to heart and continue to peel the onion’.

Sometimes, however, the work is left undone because, more prosaically and yet more cruelly, the life of the historian is cut short just at the moment when his latest work nears completion. This is also the case with The Foreign Office's War, 1939–41, which Keith left behind, when he died in April 2015, shortly after retiring as Professor of History at the Royal Military College of Canada (Collège militaire royal du Canada) (RMC). He had devoted much of his life to the study of great power politics, and more especially the British Foreign Office and the service departments in Whitehall, the mores and mentalities of diplomats, officials and their political masters with particular reference to their dealings with Russia, both in her Tsarist and her Soviet guises.

Historians bring to their work a distinct perspective, reflecting their own background and upbringing and conditioned by their generational experiences.

The 1930s and the period of the Second World War are never out of fashion amongst historians. A continuous stream of publications – be they learned monographs, scholarly articles or popular histories – testifies to that fact. For Britain, this period continues to play a significant, if not indeed determinant, role in how the country sees itself and its relations with the rest of its continent.

This view is all too often tinged with the sepia tones of nostalgia and coloured by exaggerated assumptions of Britain's power. The waxing and waning of British influence in the world, and the nature of the elements of power that underpinned the nation's international position and the nature of their interaction, have been the subject of enduring fascination for historians. They lie also at the core of the work of Keith Neilson (1948–2015). A native of Alberta in Western Canada, and from his vantage point at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, he brought an ‘imperial’ and global perspective to studies of Britain's external relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work did not neglect the fundamentally European setting of British policy, however. On the contrary, it is remarkable for its finely balanced appreciation of the global nature of British policy, encompassing both its European and the overseas dimensions. Whilst appreciating the cultural or ideological aspects of the subject – entirely befitting for someone of his fine literary sensibilities – Keith nevertheless placed questions of political and material power at the heart of his studies. These matters are also at the heart of The Foreign Office's War, 1939–41: British Strategic Foreign Policy and the Major Neutral Powers. It offers a finely drawn, yet robustly argued and meticulously evidenced, portrait of a department that was central to the framing and executing of foreign policy but that struggled to (re)gain some degree of control over fast-moving events. As with Keith's earlier works, it is its author's good historical an antennae, highly sensitive to subtle and profound shifts of opinion and power, that distinguishes this book.

The Foreign Office's War follows on, but in significant ways transcends, his 2006 monograph on interwar Anglo-Soviet relations. In narrow chronological terms, it continues the account of great power relations from early 1939 to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

To group electoral politics and foreign policy together must, at first glance, appear quixotic. It certainly runs against established historiographical verities. Diplomatic historians are wont to assert the separation of the British state's external activities from the domestic preoccupations of its political elite. Thus, James Joll, in his magisterial survey of the origins of the First World War, concluded that, in sharp contrast to the continental Powers, any link between domestic affairs and foreign policy decision-making is well-nigh impossible to establish. At the same time, all too often, in all too many accounts of British history in the long nineteenth century, the many foreign complications that plagued policy-makers appear as little more than irritating, irrelevant even, intrusions that may safely be swatted aside.

The tide, however, has now begun to turn. If Marvin Swartz's study of the 1870s did not quite find the echo that it deserved, a range of recent studies have tackled the ‘high politics’ of foreign policy, primarily in the mid-Victorian period. For the eighteenth century, Jeremy Black has emphasised the significance of public debate in framing and shaping policy. To appreciate that significance, it is necessary to consider the complexity of political resonances that certain concepts or issues had acquired for Hanoverian politicians within a broader framework of Britain's evolving strategic culture. Spanning a longer period from the eighteenth century to the inter-war period in the twentieth century, albeit in a specifically English context, Miles Taylor's examination of the iconography of John Bull has shown how public discourse at sub-élite levels reflected contemporary concerns about external affairs.

Students of Victorian and Edwardian electoral politics are confronted with a paradox. For all the energetic exertions of the parties and their agents at parliamentary by-elections, and for all the importance contemporaries attached to such contests, they have rarely left their mark on the scholarly literature. On the contrary, the historical study of British electoral politics is concentrated on general elections. There are obvious reasons for this. General elections decide the fate of governments and determine the overall balance of parties in parliament. They are national events; and they are treated as milestones in the narratives of political history, as attested in the titles of innumerable books. Important as they are, however, general elections do not comprise anything like the totality of British electoral behaviour. Britons cast their parliamentary ballot on other occasions, at by-elections triggered by the death, resignation or retirement of sitting MPs, and they do so often. Just quite how often is frequently overlooked by historians. While some literature exists on twentieth-century by-elections, most notably Chris Cook and John Ramsden's collection of essays, far less has been published on the Victorian and Edwardian periods. This is not to say they have been ignored entirely, but coverage is uneven at best.