This article traces the early contacts between the Spanish anti-Republican conspirators and Germany prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936. It offers new insights into the role played by General Sanjurjo in the run-up to the coup d'état and highlights the importance of chance and personality in the process which led to the Nazi intervention in Spain. The activities of Admiral Canaris' Abwehr as well as of the Gestapo, the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party prior to the coup are also reassessed. The article uses new Spanish archival evidence to identify how Franco's emissaries met with Hitler, while General Mola's emissaries followed in the wake of the contacts established by Sanjurjo. It challenges the role attributed to the German businessman Johannes Bernhardt enshrined in existing literature. Its conclusions also challenge existing military and economic interpretations of Hitler's decision to assist Franco by asserting the importance of large strategic motives behind the Führer's move.

Between 1942 and 1945, 5,300 Organisation Todt workers were brought to Jersey to build the defensive fortifications ordered by Hitler. A small number of Russian slave labourers escaped from island camps and were sheltered by Jersey residents until the liberation. The article describes the activities of these helpers and the rudimentary network of safe houses they created, as well as comparing their motives with those of the rescuers of Jews in occupied Europe. It ends by outlining reasons for the neglect of this episode of British wartime history and suggests the adoption of a comparative approach as the best way towards an understanding of the possibilities and limitations of resistance in the Channel Islands.

In November 1962 the British and French governments signed an irreversible agreement to build together the Western world's first civil supersonic aeroplane: Concorde. This article explores the background to the agreement, looking in particular at why Britain and France co-operated with each other rather than with the United States or West Germany, the other possible partners. The central argument is that the agreement was driven not by technological convergence in the aircraft industry but by a weakening of Britain's position in 1961 caused by American unwillingness to partner Britain in the supersonic adventure and Britain's decision to apply for membership of the Common Market. The French government was then able to exploit that weakness in order to acquire technological expertise particularly in the field of aircraft engine construction.

Based on recently released official documents, the article explores the role played by advanced technology in the Wilson government's efforts to join the Common Market. The analysis focuses on the development of the ultra-centrifuge process – a new technology to produce enriched uranium. The article shows that in restricting collaboration to the Netherlands and West Germany, the British government sought to undermine France's leading role in Europe and to undermine Franco-German relations. It also demonstrates that Britain was determined to establish a European solution to the question of uranium supply even if this led to serious frictions in the Anglo-American special relationship.

The article argues that many of the factors which eventually produced Italian fascism should be identified not in the divisions of the war years nor in the conflicts of the immediate postwar period but in the period 1900–15 and in the failure of Giovanni Giolitti's reformist strategy. The increasing popular disaffection with parliamentary politics before the war reflected the inability of Giolitti to widen the political base of liberalism through significant social reform. It was this failure which made the experience of the First World War especially disastrous in Italy. In particular, it is argued that liberal governments totally failed to understand the kind of social conflict which was developing in the large estates of the Po valley – the area which would provide the specific context for the explosion of Fascism in late 1920. The essay links Fascism, therefore, less to an often cited ‘working class revolutionary threat’ in 1919–20 than to unresolved long-term structural problems in certain areas of rural Italy. Alexander De Grand offers a critical commentary on Paul Corner's conclusions and the author gives his response.

The idea of an Italian Sonderweg is interesting, but it is not exactly a new interpretation of the Giolittian era. Gaetano Salvemini was very clear in blaming Giolitti for distorting Italy's path to democracy. I agree with Paul Corner's cautionary remark that nothing before the First World War made fascism inevitable. Still, we should look closely at the fifteen years before the Great War, if for no other reason than the fact that the great hopes for reform that marked the period gave rise to little structural reform. Giolitti simply did not bring about the modernisation of the liberal parliamentary system. However, I have my doubts that this adds up to a Sonderweg. Nowhere on the Continent did a modern mass party of the bourgeoisie emerge before 1914. Moreover, in no country did the middle-class movement for reform develop solid links with the growing socialist movement. It is curious in this regard that Corner never mentions France. Certainly the Giolittian era resembles the post-Dreyfus period in French politics more than anything that happened in Germany. It would be interesting for Professor Corner to expand on the viability of the British Lib–Lab pact of 1906; it is implied that this was a model that worked elsewhere on the Continent (p. 286). I also find it surprising that he finds the roots of the Weimar coalition in prewar imperial Germany (p. 294).

I am indebted to Alexander De Grand for taking the time and trouble to comment on my article, although I am sorry that he seems to have read it principally as an attack on Giolitti and Giolittian policies. While I can see that it is possible to read this into the paper, it was certainly not my intention to lay the responsibility for the development of Fascism at Giolitti's door. My concern was rather to seek to identify some of the reasons for the dramatic clash between left and right in 1920 and 1921 which led to the affirmation of Fascism; it was in this light that I attempted to assess the Giolittian period, which has always seemed to me the great moment of democratic possibilities between one form of repressive government and another. I agree, of course, that the great radicalising and polarising event in Italy was the First World War. My point – put very simply – was that the experience of the war might have been much less devastating for Italy if the political situation in 1914–15 had not already been characterised by profound lacerations within Italian society. To put it another way, I was interested in seeing why, as De Grand himself says, ‘the great hopes for reform that marked that [Giolittian] period gave rise to little structural reform’ and in assessing the consequences of that lack of reform for the subsequent period. The central question of the article, therefore, is that of Fascism as breach or continuity rather than the culpability of Giolitti.

Pierre-Jean Benghozi and Christian Delage, eds., Une histoire économique du cinéma français (1895–1995): Regards croisés franco-américains (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 364pp., €28.97, ISBN 2-7384-5852-1. Laurent Creton, Economie du cinéma: perspectives stratégiques (Paris: Nathan, collection ‘Nathan Université’, 1994), 288 pp., €21.19, ISBN 209-190-219-5. Laurent Creton, Cinéma et marché (Paris: Armand Colin, collection ‘U’, 1997), 254 pp., €20.58, ISBN 2-200-01769-3. Eric Dubet, Economie du cinéma européen: de l'interventionnisme à l'action entrepreneuriale Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), 286 pp., €22.87, ISBN 2-7384-9043-3. Martin Dale, The Movie Game: The Film Business in Britain, Europe and America (London: Cassell, 1997), 340 pp., $19.95 (pb), ISBN 0-304-33387-5. Jean-Michel Frodon, La projection nationale: cinéma et nation, collection ‘Le champ méthodologique’ (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), 248 pp., €20.58, ISBN 2-7381-0586-6. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds., Film Europe and Film America: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange (1920–1939) (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 406 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-85989-546-7. Albert Moran, ed., Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996), 286 pp., $24.99, ISBN 0-415-09791-6. David Puttnam, The Undeclared War: The Struggle for Control of the World's Film Industry (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 414 pp., £7.99 (pb), ISBN 0-00-255675-8. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (Chicago: A Cappella, 2000), 228 pp., $24.00, ISBN 1-55652-406-4.

Daniel Gossel, Briten, Deutsche und Europa. Die Deutsche Frage in der britischen Außenpolitik 1945–1962 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 259pp., DM 88.00, ISBN 3-515-07159-8. Klaus Larres, ed., Uneasy Allies: British-German Relations and European Integration Since 1945 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000) 344pp., $85.00, ISBN 0-19-829383-6. Werner Rouget, Schwierige Nachbarschaft am Rhein: Frankreich–Deutschland, ed. Ernst Weisenfeld and Joachim Bitterlich (Bonn: Bouvier, 1998), 160pp., DM 29.80 ISBN 3-416-02762-0. Friso Wielenga, Vom Feind zum Partner. Die Niederlande und Deutschland seit 1945. (Münster: Agenda Verlag, 2000), 522pp., DM 59.80, ISBN 3-896880721. Robert Bohn, Jürgen Elvert and Karl Christian Lammers, eds., Deutsch-skandinavische Beziehungen nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998), 280pp., DM 96.00, ISBN 3-515-07320-5. Birgit Aschmann, ‘Treue Freunde. . .’? Westdeutschland und Spanien 1945–1963 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), 502pp., DM 188.00, ISBN 3-515-07579-8. Guido Müller, ed., Deutschland und der Westen: Internationale Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert, Festschrift für Klaus Schwabe. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998), 381pp., DM 138.00, ISBN 3-515-07251-9. Gottfried Niedhart, Detlef Junker and Michael W. Richter, eds., Deutschland in Europa. Nationale Interessen und internationale Ordnung im 20.Jahrhundert. (Mannheim: Palatium, 1997), 397pp., DM 98.00, ISBN 3-920671-29-5.

Andreas Malycha, Die SED. Geschichte ihrer Stalinisierung 1946–1953 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2000), 541 pp., DM 98.00, ISBN 3-506-75331-2. Gareth Pritchard, The making of the GDR 1945–53. From antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 244 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0-7190-5654-3. Mark Allinson, Politics and popular opinion in East Germany 1945–68 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 178 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0-7190-5554-7. Jonathan Grix, The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR (Basingstoke/New York: Macmillan/Palgrave, 2000), 213 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0-333-80098-2. Raymond G. Stokes, Constructing Socialism. Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 260 pp., $51.00, ISBN 0-8018-6391-0. Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 248pp., £14.99, ISBN 0-7456-1045-5. Detlef Nakath and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, Die Häber-Protokolle. Schlaglichter der SED–Westpolitik 1973–1985 (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 1999), 480 pp., DM 48.00, ISBN 3-320-01968-6. Benno-Eide Siebs, Die Aussenpolitik der DDR 1976–1989. Strategien und Grenzen (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999), 461 pp., DM 128.00, ISBN 3-506-77510-3.