The 1890s can easily be portrayed as the era of missed opportunities in Anglo-German relations. Before the Kruger telegram, the Boer War, the Boxer rebellion and the Berlin to Bagdad railway, and most particularly before the naval race, it seems possible that Britain and Germany might have drawn closer together and that areas of mutual interest might have led to co-operation rather than antagonism. The failure to draw together in the 1890s, it can be argued, precipitated the series of disputes that progressively embittered Anglo-German relations. If only an understanding had been reached before each side became convinced of the other's enmity, if only men on both sides had been more reasonable, more judicious, more temperate, perhaps Europe could have avoided the division into armed camps, and perhaps the cataclysm of 1914 could have been averted.

When faced in 1920 with allegations of unfair treatment of women civil servants, Austen Chamberlain, the chancellor of the exchequer, expressed some surprise and countered that the postwar settlement not only ‘marked a great advance in the position of women in the Civil Service, but appeared to provide the most suitable machinery for ensuring that the opportunities afforded to women in the Civil Service should be full and liberal. Indeed…the proposals are the best that could be adopted in the interests of women themselves.’ Was the chancellor right? And if not, why not? Such questions may seem surprising or even wilfully obscure to more traditional administrative historians: of what importance anyway are the real or imagined grievances of a gaggle of women, most of whom were humble rank and file? That view, however, is appropriate only if the civil service is taken at its own estimation or, rather, that of its masters, those men at the top in what was called, variously, the first division, class I, and the administrative grade. Behind its façade of bland homogeneity raged both class and gender conflict. The former has been studied at some length. The latter has not. In beginning to remedy this deficiency this article inspects the treatment by the civil service, with the Treasury at its head, of one category of staff, women; an inspection which illuminates its public image as a rational and professional body representative of society and responsive to its needs.

In the summer of 1867 Lord Derby's minority Conservative government, scarcely recovered from the political steeplechase which ended in the Second Reform Act, launched an expedition into Abyssinia, the declared aim of which was to free a group of British captives in duress there. This expensive little war is now remembered, if at all, as a lavish and triumphant picnic for the Indian army yet, as a recent historian has pointed out, it does not deserve to be dismissed as a ‘military curiosity’. Certainly for contemporaries its origins were a vexed issue and one which was never satisfactorily resolved. Critics in the press and parliament laid the blame on the previous Liberal administration. They maintained that back in 1863 the Foreign Office had lost an important letter from Theodore of Abyssinia. When the king failed to receive a reply, he reacted to this snub by throwing the British consul and a group of missionaries into fetters. Responsibility for any such blunder lay in the last resort with the foreign secretary of the day, Lord John Russell. Elderly, frail, and with a reputation for rashness untarnished by time, Russell's term of office (1859–65) had been marked by a series of crises which had brought Britain into dangerous or ignominious confrontation with the U.S.A. over the Trent incident, with Russia over the Polish rebellion, and with Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein.

When great powers quarrel their lesser neighbours are often worst affected. Cajoled and wooed, they are drawn into conflicts they would prefer to avoid. Such involvement may exacerbate internal weaknesses and end by damaging them long after the causes of the original dispute have faded. Nineteenth-century Iran became drawn into Anglo-Russian rivalries in Central Asia as each sought to secure her assistance. Spectators of the so-called ‘Great Game’ were not allowed: the boxes were part of the field of play.

At the national women's conference convened by the government in September 1943 Winston Churchill assured the women delegates that the contribution to the war effort by British women had ‘definitely altered those social and sex balances which years of convention had established’. His belief that the war had brought about profound changes in the status of women was shared by contemporary authors attempting to evaluate the effect of the war on British women. Studies written near the end of the war by Margaret Goldsmith and Gertrude Williams refer to a wartime ‘revolution’ in the position of women. Both authors defined this revolution primarily in terms of the changed position of women workers.

At the beginning of his venomous critique of conservative parliamentarians, Abel Bonnard commented:

Le parti modéré, négligeable en apparence et si l'on s'en tient au peu qu'il a fait, ressemble à une carafe d'eau claire où le vulgaire ne voit que le plus nul des objets, mais dans laquelle un devin penché aperçoit mille scènes du passé et de l'avenir.

To judge by the continuing dearth of works on the French parliamentary right in the inter-war years, the properties of this subject have remained hidden. Scholarly attention has been directed almost exclusively towards the ideological extremes of both left and right. Those nearer the centre of French politics, possessing a less identifiable ideology but a far greater numerical strength inside the Palais Bourbon, have been largely ignored. There is still no detailed or comprehensive account of the parliamentary right's evolution in the final decades of the Third Republic.

‘The rapid growth of wealth, especially among the classes of the greatest activity and enterprise, has led, for a number of years past, to a diminished watchfulness, outside the walls of Parliament, respecting the great and cardinal subject of economy in the public charges, and the relation between the income of the State and its expenditure. I earnesdy desire that the paramount interest of the lately enfranchised classes in thrifty administration may operate powerfully to bring about a change.’ So Gladstone trumpeted the leitmotif of his administration, at the outset of the general election campaign in October 1868. The fundamental importance of fiscal strategy in Gladstone's politics has recently been emphasized. Faced with an ineluctable increase in civil expenditure and rising expectations of governmental contributions to the public weal – what he termed ‘scattering grants at the solicitation of individuals and classes’, the system of ‘making things pleasant all round’ and stimulating ‘local cupidity to feed upon the public purse’ – Gladstone was determined that his ministry, backed as he believed by the votes of the thrifty working classes, should reduce such expectations. ‘I t is the special duty of public men’, he told his constituents soon after taking office, ‘to watch the very beginnings of evil’ in regard to any relaxing of the general principles of economy and thrift; and he promised to reduce expenditure in the coming year.

Over ten years have passed since Michael Howard offered what he himself called a controversial thesis about British defence policy before the Second World War. This was that ‘the Empire brought Britain no strength in her dealings with Germany. Yet British strength had nevertheless to be dissipated in the Empire's defence.’ By 1937 the needs of home defence against air attack and of imperial defence seemed so overwhelming toBritish policy-makers that the cabinet decided that no expeditionary force could be spared to help maintain the European balance of power. Howard stressed that he was offering only a ‘very rough preliminary sketch’, which was ‘probably distorted and certainly incomplete’, in view of the limited range of documents which he had had time to consult. In particular, what was missing from his thesis was any attempt to give weights to the relative importance of home and imperial defence problems as explanations for lack of preparation to commit land forces to help allies on the European continent.

After the fall of France in 1940, Britain's predicament in the Middle East became worse still when the French authorities in Syria and Lebanon aligned themselves with the new Vichy government. The British, already outnumbered by Italian forces and uncertain of Arab loyalties, now found their northern flank controlled by men susceptible to Axis pressure. Both Churchill and de Gaulle responded with the determination that the Levant should be denied to the Axis and placed in friendly hands. Despite this common resolve, however, fundamental differences emerged during the Anglo-Free French invasion of Syria in 1941. This hastily improvised venture was marred by rash political tactics, poor liaison, bad diplomacy and the interventions of Churchill and de Gaulle. Although the Syrian flank was secured, this affair did serious damage to Anglo-Free French relations, created new problems in the Levant, and precipitated personal antagonism between Churchill and de Gaulle.

The benevolence of Leo XIII towards France has puzzled historians, just as it exasperated many contemporaries – especially during the anticlerical high tide of the Dreyfus crisis. The opening of the Vatican archives for Leo's reign (1878–1903) has put investigation of the issue on a much firmer footing, as have the latest releases of documents at the Jesuit archives in Rome. This article indicates some of the ways in which thisnew material enlarges and qualifies the impressions given by older sources – notably the valuable holdings of the Assumptionist archives in Rome and the more familiar contents of the various governmental archives in France, Italy and elsewhere.

During the First World War, Britain was obliged for the first time for over a century to raise a mass army. Initially, this seemed to raise no insuperable problem; by the end of 1914, slightly over one million men had enlisted. Thereafter, however, civilian enthusiasm waned, and the government had to employ other means to stimulate the flow of recruits – alteration of the military service age limits and, later, the introduction of compulsory military service. Taken together, voluntary recruiting and conscription permitted the raising and maintenance of a mass army. By the time of the armistice on 11 November t 1918, almost five million men had entered the army, and a further half million had entered the two other services.

There is little reason to doubt that the Truman Doctrine was the direct result of the British announcement to the Americans on 21 February 1947 of the almost immediate withdrawal of financial aid to Greece. The Truman, Doctrine, in turn, is generally accepted as the real beginning of the Cold War; at least it is the declaration of full American involvement. What is not so definite is the British motivation for their withdrawal of aid. It is commonly assumed to have been the result of severe British financial difficulties in February 1947. In hindsight, this is highly credible because of the fuel crisis of that month and its effect on the export programme, as well as the approaching exhaustion of the American loan. It then follows that the British Labour government abandoned Greece at a time when its own continuation was in danger.

In 1931 Herbert Butterfield, precisely as old as the century, published a short book entitled The whig interpretation of history. It made him famous, and for the next forty years or so he stood forth as one of the leading voices in the profession. His voluminous writings in books and essays were read avidly by schoolmasters and their pupils, by students and – less regularly – by dons; to a wide range of educated and reflective people not themselves historians he represented the voice of history in England. He added a further dimension to his image when singlehandedly and with considerable courage he engaged the then dominant Namierite school of eighteenth-century studies; though he cannot be said to have triumphed in that battle, he emerged from it with honour and with the satisfaction of having been able to crack the crystalline selfregard of the opposing party in several places. Those who knew only the voice, on paper at that, were liable to be profoundly disconcerted when they encountered him: no whitebearded old testament prophet after all, preaching stern simplicities, but a clean-shaven (often somewhatrazored) man permanently about thirty-five years old, brisk, cheerful, responsive, entertaining, variously chain-smoking or sworn off cigarettes altogether, always courteous, never pompous. It might be thought that today, less than four years after his death, it is yet too early to venture upon an assessment of his achievement, but it seems to me desirable that the task should be attempted by one who still remembers the famous Butterfield giggle while reading the Butterfield writings. My own special qualification, I would claim, lies in the fact that I knew him but not all that closely and did not belong to his circle (which tended to be based on Peterhouse); in thirty years of sharing the same history faculty with him I do not remember ever once seriously talking history with him.