While remaining appropriately humble about the crudity of his data and the limitations of his sources, the social historian who is willing to employ numerical methods and statistical procedures can make reasonably confident estimates of the extent of illiteracy in early modern England. A careful examination of the ability of witnesses before the ecclesiastical courts to sign their depositions, of testators to sign their wills, of applicants for marriage licences to sign the allegations and bonds, and of subscribers to protestations and declarations actually to write their names on the document, reveals a pattern of widespread but unevenly distributed illiteracy. The best of these sources provides evidence not only on the social structure of illiteracy, but also on its changing level between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Progress towards the reduction of illiteracy was decidedly erratic.

In Venice on 5 October 1570:

A man of ordinary height, dressed in the foreign style, with a curved black beard, was escorted into the Holy Office and asked his age.

He answered, ‘Some forty years’.

He was asked his name, his surname, his father, his status, his country and his employment.

He answered, ‘My name is Abraham, called Righetto, my father's Num Rig (a Spaniard of Portugal), my occupation is that of an exchange-broker; I am no Christian but a Jew; and I have been detained in the prisons of the Most Excellent Council of Ten’.

He was asked, ‘For what reason have their Most Excellent Lordships sent you to this Holy Office?’

He answered, ‘I know not, and cannot imagine, for I have never heard of Jews entering this Office’.

He was asked, ‘Do you know what Office it is?’ He answered, ‘This moment I was told it was the Office of the Holy Inquisition’.

He was asked, ‘In the last ten years, where have you lived?’

He answered, ‘Lately I have been in Spain, and was there three years from leaving this place, and I journeyed, too, to France; and seven months have passed since my return to Venice’.

Historians have displayed a curious ambivalence towards the English Revolution of 1688. On the one hand, they have argued that it preserved the monarchy; on the other, that it altered it. Edmund Burke was one of the earliest to voice this ambivalence. ‘The Revolution was made', he wrote in 1790, ‘to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.’ But then he added,’ They [who led at the Revolution] secured soon after the frequent meeting of parliament, by which the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular representative and of the magnates of the kingdom.’ Macaulay expressed the same uncertainty in a single sentence: ‘But, though a new constitution was not needed, it was plain that changes were required.’

In the light of previous historiography any reference to tory organization in the mid-eighteenth century is likely to seem a contradiction in terms. In the Enid Muir Lecture of 1954, Sir Lewis Namier argued that by the 1750s ‘tory’ had become effectively redundant as a party name: that the term could no longer be used to describe a particular set of political beliefs, nor applied to any recognized group within parliament; that those few individual M.P.'s who still called themselves tories should more properly be regarded as independent country gentlemen: ‘a nationwide group without a leader or programme or deeper coherence’. As Namier went on to remark, hardly any political correspondence between leading tories has survived for the period after 1715. The consequent temptation for historians to rely either on the ill-informed and frequently contemptuous assessments of the tory party supplied by whig observers, or to assume that the lack of any easily available evidence presupposes a concomitant paucity of tory organization, has usually proved irresistible.

One of the perquisites of having been a high ranking Conservative politician is the near-certain admiration of future biographers, even when, as in the case of Sire James Graham, the biographers have no political axe to grind and do not rise to hero worship. Professor Erickson and Professor Ward, Graham's most recent biographers, do not ignore the fierce contemporary condemnation that Graham evoked: Ward, indeed, takes Graham's unpopularity as the starting point for a re-evalution of his career. But both have distinguished between his skills in political management, his political acumen and personality, on the one hand, and his vision, ability, enterprise and industry on the other, and by concentrating on the latter have produced a picture of which Graham would have approved. What results is, in many respects, a typical Peelite self-portrait – of a bold, resourceful, tireless and courageous reformer, valiantly struggling against vested interest, ignorance and apathy, saddened but not surprised by the hostility which he experienced.

On the face of it, the war between Austria and the allied forces of Piedmont and France in the summer of 1859, and the ensuing struggles that culminated in the unification of most of Italy under King Victor Emanuel, would seem to have little to do with the evolution of Russian foreign policy. Russia took care not to be drawn into the fighting and greeted the unification process with loud disapprobation. Yet that war could not have been fought as a limited war without Russian collusion. Napoleon III required – besides the tacit approval of England (where public opinion supported ‘Italy for the Italians’) – the aid of another nation in order to be what Bismarck later called ’à trois’ in a Europe of five great powers. For Russia to provide that aid obliged her to abandon the responsibilities shouldered by Alexander I and Nicholas I, ‘the gendarme of Europe’, champion of Europe's conservative instincts and guarantor of its treaties.

This article is a byproduct of a large-scale research project on the politics of Salford since 1830. In a sense, it shows what can happen to an historian when working amongst political scientists, for the article attempts to apply a few of the latter's concerns, and ways of looking at the world, to a specific historical situation. Though the raw material for the article is almostentirely historical, I hope that its themes will be of interest to people in both disciplines.

A little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister's garden, and their business to cultivate the Prime Minister's mind. These gendemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service cabinet. They are rather of the class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in widi Lord Milner, whose spiritual home is fixed somewhere between Balliol and Heidelburg. Their function is to emerge from their huts in Downing Street, like the competitors in a Chinese examination, with answers to our thousand questions of the Sphinx.

Relations between Italy and Britain, even after Mussolini's seizure of power, remained entirely satisfactory within the framework of their traditional partnership in European affairs until the Ethiopian crisis of 1935. It is, however, well known that the first strains in the relationship rcame only in the period from July to October 1935, when British naval forces were concentrated in the Mediterranean. This particular episode as the Italo-Ethiopian crisis, occasionally referred to as ‘The Italo-Ethiopian emergency in the Mediterranean’, has been the subject of several untested and misleading assumptions made by historians whose attention has been focused almost solely on the international aspects of the Ethiopian crisis. This review is wholly based on Anglo-Italian records.