Robert Brennan, Ireland Standing Firm: My Wartime Mission in Washington and Eamon de Valera – A Memoir, ed. Richard H. Rupp (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002), 182 pp., €20.00 (pb), ISBN 1900621681.

John P. Duggan, Herr Hempel at the German Legation in Dublin, 1937–1945 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 328 pp., €45.00 (hb), ISBN 0716527464.

Mark Hull, Irish Secrets: German Espionage in Wartime Ireland, 1939–1945 (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 383 pp., €55.00 (hb), ISBN 0716527561.

MI5 and Ireland, 1939–1945: The Official History, ed. and introduced by Eunan O'Halpin (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2003), 130 pp., €55.00 (hb), ISBN 0716527545.

This article examines the history of the relationship between insurance and civil society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It tests the conventional narrative that this relationship followed an anticlimactic course, marked by the burgeoning of self-organised mutual societies in the nineteenth century and the decline and marginalisation of this sector of civil society owing to the rise of corporate insurance companies and statutory social insurance in the twentieth century. The article offers first a comparative analysis of nineteenth-century mutual insurance in different European countries (Britain, Germany, France and Switzerland), calling attention to limitations to the democratic and self-organised character of mutual associations. The second part of the article concentrates on a case study of twentieth-century corporate insurance in Switzerland, examining how life insurance companies dealt with customers and their personal data. The study indicates that insurance corporations adopted norms of extended privacy protection in the 1980s, a process that reflected new legal demands, customer claims and policies of civil rights organisations. The conclusion summarises the contradictory effects of insurance on the history of civil society and discusses the implications for the concept of civil society.

Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 192 pp., $24.50 (hb), ISBN 0231127960.

Henry Laurens, Orientales II. La IIIe République et l'Islam (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2004), 376 pp., €29.00, ISBN 2271062071.

William E. Watson, Tricolor and Crescent: France and the Islamic World (London: Praeger, 2003), 295 pp., £31.99 (hb), ISBN 0275974707.

But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.

Iris Borowy and Wolf D. Gruner eds., Facing Illness in Troubled Times: Health in Europe in the Interwar Years 1918–1939 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 424 pp., €64.00 (hb), ISBN 363119486.

Horst H. Freyhofer The Nuremberg Medical Trial: The Holocaust and the Origin of the Nuremberg Medical Code, Studies in Modern European History 53 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 209 pp., €30.00 (pb), ISBN 0820467979.

Ulrike Lindner Gesundheitspolitik in der Nachkriegszeit. Großbritannien und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Vergleich, Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London 57 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), 581 pp., €64.00 (hb), ISBN 3486200143.

Michael Mann Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 429 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 052153856.

Robert O. Paxton The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 321 pp., £8.99 (pb), ISBN 0141014326.

Nancy Bermeo Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2003), 265 pp., £13.95 (pb), ISBN 0691089701.

Didier Musiedlack Mussolini (Paris: Presses de Sciences PO, 2005), 436 pp., €16.15, ISBN 2724608062.

Paul H. Lewis Latin Fascist Elites. The Mussolini, Franco and Salazar Regimes (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 209 pp., $85.95 (hb), ISBN 027597880X.

Scott Kieff, ed., Perspectives on Properties of the Human Genome (Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2003), 538 pp., €126.00, ISBN 0120176505.

John Sulston and Georgina Ferry, The Common Thread. A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome (Washington: Joseph Henry Press, 2002), 310 pp., €12.30, ISBN 0309084091.

Kevin Davies, Cracking the Genome. Inside the Race to Unlock Human DNA (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 327 pp., €18.00, ISBN 0801871409.

Bronwyn Parry, Trading the Genome. Investigating the Commodification of BioInformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 319 pp., €37.50, ISBN 0231121741.

Magali Franceschi, Droit et marchandisation de la connaissance sur les gènes humains (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2004), 247 pp., €25.00, ISBN 2271062004.

Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Society. Selected Essays (Boston, MA: GNU Press, 2002), 220 pp., €18.00, ISBN 1882114981.

Special Issue on Open Source Software Development, Research Policy 32 (2003), Elsevier Science.

The main aim of the GDR's foreign policy was to promote the survival and stabilisation of the SED dictatorship, and the so-called ‘worldwide revolution’, by seeking external recognition. After it was granted full sovereignty in 1954–5 the East German state carefully cultivated relations with Western countries. The Scandinavian countries received special attention on the basis of common history, natural economic and transport links, a close relationship with their respective communist parties and East German conformity to Soviet policy in the Baltic region. Up to the 1970s the GDR's main aim was to end its own international isolation. Despite a few spectacular successes, not even Sweden was won over and the final breakthrough did not come until the government of the FRG embarked on its new and successful Ostpolitik. In 1972–3 the Scandinavian countries were among the first officially to recognise the GDR.

Tina Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 256 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 0472113607.

Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 192 pp., $24.50 (pb), ISBN 0231134541.

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 397 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0674011031.

Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Blackening Europe. The Afro-American Presence (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 314 pp., £18.99 (pb), ISBN 0-415-94399X.

Omer Bartov Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 248 pp., (pb), ISBN 0801486815.

Doris L. Bergen War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 280 pp., $17.95 (pb), ISBN 0847696316.

Inga Clendinnen Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238 pp., $15 (pb), ISBN 0521012694.

Debórah Dwork ed., Voices & Views. A History of the Holocaust (New York: Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, 2002), 687 pp., $44.95 (pb), ISBN 0970060211.

Cornelia Hecht Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz 2003), 432 pp., €32.00 (hb), ISBN 3801241378.

Dan Stone Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003), 308 pp., $49.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034907.

Sue Vice Representing the Holocaust (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers), 280 pp., £17.50 (pb), £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034966.

Mark Gilbert, Surpassing Realism. The Politics of European Integration since 1945 (Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 276 pp., $26.95, ISBN 0742519147.

John Gillingham, European Integration 1950–2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 588 pp., £47.50, ISBN 0521012627.

Gilles Grin, The Battle of the Single European Market. Achievements and Economics 1985–2000 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 375 pp., $144.50, ISBN 0710309384.

Wolf D. Gruner, and Wichard Woyke, Europa-Lexikon. Länder – Politik – Institutionen (Munich: Beck, 2004), 505 pp., €19.90, ISBN 3406494250.

STEVEN VAN HECKE and EMMANUEL GERARD, eds., Christian Democratic Parties in Europe since the End of the Cold War, KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society 1 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), 343 pp., €29.00, ISBN 9058673774.

Guido Müller, Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2005), 525 pp., €54.80, ISBN 3486577360.

Anita Ziegerhofer, Botschafter Europas. Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi und die Paneuropa-Bewegung in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Boehlau, 2004), 587 pp., €69.00, ISBN 3205772122.

Anita Ziegerhofer, Europäische Integrationsgeschichte unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des österreichischen Weges nach Brüssel (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2004), 235 pp., €19.00, ISBN 3706519046.