Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains – In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (Henry Holt: New York, 2002) 524 pp., £20.00 (hb), ISBN 0-33-378230-5.

Michael Curtis, Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime (Arcade Publishing: New York, 2003) 419 pp., $27.95 (hb), ISBN: 1-55-970689-9.

Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 690 pp., £12.99 (pb), ISBN 0-19-925457-5.

Andrew Shennan, The Fall of France, 1940 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 181 pp., $22.99 (pb), ISBN 0-582-29081-3.

Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past. History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 136 pp., $29.95 (hb), ISBN 0-8122-3645-9.

Historians are from Mars and political scientists are from Venus (or was it the other way round?). The most striking feature of Erik Jones's stimulating and generous response to my article is the way in which it highlights the divergent approaches to the postwar era adopted by historians and political scientists. In many respects, this is a very good thing. We need the stimuli provided by those rooted in different traditions bringing their distinctive approaches to the same subject matter, just as, for the early medieval period, historians, archaeologists and literary scholars confront the fragmentary evidence of post-Roman Europe in contrasting but often mutually enriching ways.

Much has been written about the role of intellectuals in the Serbian nationalist movement of the last two or three decades. The quantity has generally been more noteworthy than the quality. Recently, however, some excellent work has appeared, notably by these three authors. Each is making important and original contributions to our understanding of the cultural and ideological context of Yugoslavia's demise.

This article considers the postwar Czechoslovak regime's attempt to employ the courts to gain political legitimacy. In particular, it examines four retribution trials of prominent Czech collaborators and German Nazis and the role these cases played in the development of the contemporary power struggle. The article argues that the postwar regime's manipulation of the judicial system for political ends was fraught with contradictions and ultimately met with only limited success.

Dietrich Beyrau, ed., Im Dschungel der Macht. Intellektuelle Professionen unter Stalin und Hitler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 399 pp., €52.00 (hb.), ISBN 3-525-36244-7.

Corine Defrance, Les alliés occidentaux et les universités allemandes, 1945–1949 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000), 406 pp., €27.50, ISBN 2-271-05768-X.

Ralph Jessen, Akademische Elite und kommunistische Diktatur. Die ostdeutsche Hochschullehrerschaft in der Ulbricht-Ära (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 552 pp., €52.00, ISBN 3-525-35797-4.

Brian Pullan with Michele Abendstern, A History of the University of Manchester, 1951–73 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 281 pp., €32.95, ISBN 0-7190-5670-5.

Reba N. Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 308 pp., €55.00, ISBN 0-8047-2383-4.

Alain Corbin, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 359 pp., €8.69 (pb), ISBN 2080814532.

Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night. Music and the Great War (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 598 pp., $49.95 (hb), ISBN 0520231589.

Jeffrey Jackson, Making Jazz French. Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 266 pp., $21.95 (pb), ISBN 0822331373.

Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 388 pp., $55.00 (hb), ISBN 0226287351.

David Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003), 254 pp., $25.00 (pb), ISBN 1859736319.

Though undoubtedly thriving, the history of music is still a somewhat peripheral area of research which many historians dismiss as secondary. For many years publication in the subject remained the domain of two kinds of researchers, either musicologists – ‘insiders’ au fait with the technical vocabulary – or sociologists and practitioners of ‘cultural studies’ – ‘outsiders’ chiefly interested in the reception of musical phenomena and their role in the constitution of individual and collective identities. This division has become very blurred over the last few years, which have seen the emergence of a number of works with an interdisciplinary approach. But for most historians the history of music remains a largely unfamiliar theme which they struggle to include in any global social or cultural analysis. This struggle is apparent at two levels: first, the difficulty of developing guidelines to the historicity of musical events and, second, the difficulty of escaping the chronology of classical music, which is predicated on a succession of styles and composers. Based on these two points, this article will attempt to develop, through a transverse reading of certain recent works, some working hypotheses centring on the notion of a ‘landscape of sound’ or paysage sonore, as proposed some ten years ago by Alain Corbin, a notion which, it seems to me, may make a valuable contribution to rejuvenating the history of music.

Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia. The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2002), 330 pp., $27.95 (pb), ISBN 1-571-814965.

Pilar Ortuño Anaya, European Socialists and Spain: The Transition to Democracy (London: Palgrave, 2002), 273pp., $69.95 (hb), ISBN 0-333-94927-7.

Julio Crespo MacLennan, Spain and the Process of European Integration, 1957–85. Political Change and Europeanism (London: Palgrave, 2000), 240 pp., £52.50 (hb), ISBN 0-333-928865.

S. P. Mangen, Spanish Society after Franco: Regime Transition and the Welfare State (London: Palgrave, 2001), 254 pp., $65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-333-65462-5.

Luis Moreno, The Federalization of Spain (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 192 pp., £17.50 (hb), ISBN 0-714-681644.

The contributors to this section have produced three authoritative vignettes or ‘side-bars’ that enhance and add important corrective nuances to our understanding of Yugoslavia's disintegration and civil wars and especially the positions and roles of varieties of Serbian nationalism and nationalist intellectuals in the background to and the course of those events. Drawing on their previous work, which has established each of them as respected specialists on their respective and overlapping subjects, the authors also make use of more recently published and unpublished sources to offer fresh or revised perspectives and evaluations of the personalities, ideas and consequences of their subjects. The result is a coherent, conjoined triune analysis, with emphasis on individual and collective internal incoherencies and contradictions that constructively confound efforts to ascribe some kind of evolving consistency, continuity and coherence to the ideas, role and consequences of these intellectuals and the Serbian national ideas and programmes they shaped and often initiated.

Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill & Wang), 280 pp., $24.00, ISBN 0-8090-4643-1.

Jeremy Black, ed., War in the Modern World since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2003), 268 pp., £18.99, ISBN 0-415-25140-0.

Gail Braybon, ed., Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 304 pp., £50.00, ISBN 1-57181-726-7.

Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Washington, DC, and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2003), 364 pp., $60.00, ISBN 0-521-81236-4.

Andrew Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–48 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 200 pp., £19.99, ISBN 0-7146-8430-9.

John H. Morrow Jr, The Great War: An Imperial History (New York: Routledge, 2003), 352 pp., $27.50, ISBN 0-415-20439-9.

Mario Morselli, Caporetto, 1917: Victory or Defeat? (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 176 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-714-65073-0.

Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War, Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), 318 pp., £7.99, ISBN 0-747-27157-7.

The powers of Europe fought the Great War for more than four years, but it took France fifteen years to write its official history, Germany nineteen years, and the United Kingdom an astonishing twenty-six years. These works, moreover, encompass only land operations and fill twenty-three extraordinarily detailed volumes for France, an equal number for Great Britain, and fourteen volumes for Germany. The time and energy needed to compile the thousands of necessary documents, organise that data, and construct the interpretations reflect both the enormity of the war itself and the difficulty of finding meaning in an event that so deeply shook the continent.

Craig Parsons, A Certain Idea of Europe (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 255pp., $39.95 (hb), ISBN 0-8014-4086-6.

David J. Howarth, The French Road to European Monetary Union (New York and London: Palgrave, 2001), 256pp., £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0-333-92096-1.

Mairi MacLean, Economic Management and French Business from de Gaulle to Chirac (New York and London: Palgrave, 2001), 256pp., £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0-333-76148-0.

John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds., Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 363 pp., $22.95 (pb), ISBN 0-8047-3422-4.

Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 406 pp., $13.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8014-8784-6.

Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women's Organizations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 224 pp., £47.50 (hb), ISBN 0-7190-5856-2.

Sanjeev Khagram, James V. Riker and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 400 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0-8166-3907 8.

Gabriele Metzler, Internationale Wissenschaft und Nationale Kultur: Deutsche Physiker in der Internationalen Community, 1900–1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), 304 pp., €29.90 (pb), ISBN 3-525-36246-3.

Sarah E. Mendelson and John K. Glenn, eds., The Power and Limits of NGOs: A Critical Look at Building Democracy in Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 300 pp., $16.00 (pb), ISBN 0-231-12491-0.

Alan S. Milward, The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy 1945–1963 (The United Kingdom and The European Community, Vol. I) (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2002), 512 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5111-7.

Alex May, ed., Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe: The Commonwealth and Britain's Applications to Join the European Communities (Houndsmill and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 188 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0-333-80013-3.

Oliver J. Daddow, ed., Harold Wilson and European Integration. Britain's Second Application to Join the EEC (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2003), 298 pp., £45.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5222-9, £17.50 (pb), ISBN 0-7146-8207-1.

Sir Con O'Neill, Britain's Entry into the European Community. Report by Sir Con O'Neill on the Negotiations of 1970–1972, ed. and with a foreword by Sir David Hannay (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2000), 464 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0-7146-5117-6.

Michel Lefebvre and Rémi Skoutelsky, Les Brigades Internationales. Images retrouvées (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003), 192 pp., €45.00 (hb), ISBN 2-02-052390-6.

Helen Graham, The Spanish Republic at War, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 472 pp., £13.99 (pb), ISBN 0-521-45932-X.

Javier Rodrigo, Los campos de concentración franquistas. Entre la historia y la memoria (Madrid: Siete Mares, 2003), 251 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 84-933012-05.

Michael Seidman, A ras de suelo. Historia social de la República durante la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Alianza, 2003), 388 pp., €18.70 (pb), ISBN 84-206-3706-8 (English edition: Republic of Egos. A Social History of the Spanish Civil War (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 304 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0299178641).

The Spanish Civil War is among the most passionate conflicts of the long twentieth century, as one which arouses considerable emotion, in favour of either the Republican or the Francoist side. Its duration – far beyond what had been predicted in July 1936 by the military rebels and most international observers – together with its rapid conversion into an arena of international dispute between two opposing world-views, ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-fascism’, made it of long-standing interest for world public opinion. Moreover, its internationalisation made it appear as the prelude to the Second World War. The survival of the Francoist dictatorship until 1975 contributed to the fact that the first historical analyses of the Spanish Civil War had to be written abroad and by foreign scholars, mostly French and Anglophone. Even now the Spanish conflict continues to be a matter of interest for non-Spanish scholars, who rely on a long-standing tradition of scholarship on the topic.

Neven Andjelić, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The End of a Tragedy (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 228 pp., $34.95 (pb), ISBN 0-7146-8431-7.

Tom Gallagher, The Balkans after the Cold War. From Tyranny to Tragedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 256 pp., $114.95 (hb), ISBN 0-415-27763-9.

John Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideologies and National Identities. The Case of Twentieth-Century Southeastern Europe (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2004), 309 pp., $23.95 (pb), ISBN 9639241822.

James Pettifer, ed., The New Macedonian Question (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave and St. Martin's Press, 1999), 311 pp., $24.95 (pb), ISBN 0-333-92066-X.

Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation. The Attack on Yugoslavia (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 246 pp., $10.00 (pb), ISBN 1-85984-366-2.

Maria Todorova, ed., Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory (London: Hurst & Co., 2004), 374 pp., £17.50 (pb), ISBN 1-850-65715-7.

Emerging from the obscurity of old-fashioned, specialised ‘area studies’, since 1989 the Balkans have attracted much attention from historians. The primary reason for that has been, tragically, the war in Yugoslavia and the emergence of a postwar order. Even the post-communist transitions (in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania) attracted less attention. Nevertheless, the field benefited substantially from the increased interest in the area, and lively debates took place on contested issues, sparked not least by hasty initial schemata (and stigmata) used by outside observers, such as ‘ancient hatreds’ and the like. Parallel to the attention paid to what was going on in Yugoslavia, and perhaps more productively in the long run, was the postmodern, postcolonial approach to Balkan history, inspired by Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans, which followed Edward Said's monumental Orientalism and appeared parallel to Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe. Such refreshing studies of Western representations of the region were later complemented by the internal perspective of how such representations were received, and coped with, in the region. A profusion of ‘cultural studies’ in the broadest sense followed, reflecting both the ongoing reshaping of Balkan identities and outside demand for such studies.

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.

Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.

Annegret Schüle, ‘Die Spinne’. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.

Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.

Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.

What is the difference between pre-modern despotism and modern dictatorship? The answer is simple: despotism does not need massive backing from below, but dictatorship presupposes the support of the masses. This simple distinction is the starting point of the three-year ‘mass dictatorship’ project, launched in December 2002 with the financial support of the Korea Research Foundation and Hanyang University, Seoul. The project aims to position Korean debates about coming to terms with its dictatorial past in the context of other countries' experiences with dictatorship.