It has been said of Lloyd George that ‘coming into the British system from outside, he had no respect for its traditions or accepted formalities… Most of all, he distrusted the permanent officials’. His reliance on the Garden Suburb, and what Milner described as his tendency ‘to settle things that really mattered, or unsettle them, in his own favourite way — by devious methods and through anything but the regular agents’, could be seen as evidence which supports this view. However, it was also during Lloyd George's premiership that two of the most influential officials of the interwar period, Sir Maurice Hankey and Sir Warren Fisher, acquired the standing which they held until their retirements in 1938 and 1939 respectively. Like the men of the Garden Suburb, they owed their success to Lloyd George and were personally devoted to him, but while the Garden Suburb came and went with its creator, Hankey and Fisher survived his departure. Lloyd George, the supreme individùalist as prime minister, bequeathed to his successors not the amorphous, ill-defined government machine which he had inherited from Asquith in 1916, but a reorganized and newly centralized public service.

Historians have generally accepted the verdict that the 1902 Education Act was ‘among the two or three greatest constructive measures of the twentieth century’. Most have accepted likewise the interpretation laid down by the biographer of the Act's alleged author, Sir Robert Morant, that an educational crisis forced the Unionist government to begin thinking seriously about education. Their ineptitude, shown in attempts at legislation in 1900 and 1901, forced them to turn to the one man who could help, namely Morant, secretary to the vice president of the Board of Education, Sir John Gorst, and then to the president, the duke of Devonshire. Thus ‘Balfour, Hicks-Beach and Chamberlain had all to bow the knee to his [Morant's] ruthless tenacity in argument’, whilst Morant ‘had to show Balfour and the Cabinet how the policies of their party and their own inarticulate major premises inevitably led them to the 1902 Bill – as Morant was writing it’.

Rebels against British governments could always maintain themselves far more easily at sea than on land; a guerre de course was indeed their natural resource. They could use as bases the small islands so conveniently situated athwart British trade routes in the Channel and the Irish and North seas, or the nearby ports of foreign powers; even more important, the chances of profit which a trade war held out invariably won them support not only from numbers of English seamen (especially Irish and Channel ports men), but from the cosmopolitan armateurs and floating riff-raff of the ports of France and the Low Countries as well. Yet because merchant support was vital to domestic stability and British seamen were precious, no de facto government could postpone for long a vigorous attempt to clear the seas of rebel ships.

The neutralization of the Black Sea was, perhaps, the most important single result of the Crimean War. Regarded by the western allies as a valuable new element in the security of Turkey, it was resented by the Russians as an intolerable insult to their national honour. It rapidly became the object of a diplomatic struggle. Whilst allied—and especially British—diplomacy watched with a jealous eye over its observance, the Russian Government left no stone unturned to secure its early abrogation. With treaty revision the principal object of Russian diplomacy, any European issue between 1856 and 1870 regardless of its origin, became entangled in some form or other with the Black Sea Question. On more than one occasion, the problem forced itself on the attention of the cabinets.

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.

This article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.

Italy in the Cold War. Politics, culture & society, 1948–1958. Edited by Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff. Oxford/Washington DC: Berg. 1995. Pp. xi+228, index. £34.95

War in Italy 1943–1945. A brutal story. By Richard Lamb. London: Penguin Books. 1995 (1993). Pp. viii+335, maps and index. £7.99

Italy and the wider world, 1860–1960. By R. J. B. Bosworth. London and New York: Routledge. 1996. Pp. x+252, index. £40.00

‘America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth,’ Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. ‘And the American fighting man is second to none.’ ‘Exactly,’ agreed the old man pleasantly, with a hint of taunting amusement. ‘Italy, on the other hand, is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that's exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly [[ctdot ]] You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that's what makes us so strong’.

In the last twenty years, the involvement of women's organizations in the campaign for Irish independence has featured prominently in publications and public discourse. But this article asks, did women serve the cause for independence in other ways? This article focuses on the careers of Irish women who worked for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in the period 1919–22, pressing Ireland's case for autonomy from British rule. The work of these early women abroad has been largely ignored by historians who have concentrated on the diplomatic activities of men in this period. This article first argues that these women who worked towards achieving independence for Ireland through the use of diplomacy and propaganda merit attention, but secondly they can be considered providing further insights into how women's work for the cause of Irish freedom did not warrant them a place in the diplomatic service in the new Irish Free State.

Sir Edward Grey entered the Foreign Office at a time when it was being rapidly transformed. A change in the registration system had freed the junior officials from most routine operations and encouraged the senior men to take a more active part in the actual formation of foreign policy. At the same time, a new group of men took over the most important departmental positions and entered the chief European embassies. For the most part, these men were far more conscious of German power than their predecessors and set the tone of British policy during the first years of Grey's Foreign Secretaryship. Charles Hardinge, Louis Mallet, William Tyrrell and Eyre Crowe in London, Francis Bertie, ambassador in Paris, Arthur Nicolson in St Petersburg and, after 1907, Goschen in Berlin were all to play important roles in shaping the new course.