In February 1839 Lord John Russell put before the House of Commons a set of proposals for governmental action in the field of popular education. It was a contentious move by the Home Secretary, and the bitter political tussle which it provoked was predictable. In the context of a flagging ministry facing an opposition already scenting office, it seems almost cavalier. The well-known outcome was the formation of a new executive agency for the management of the state's role in the education of the people, the Committee of Privy Council on Education. The whole incident attracts notice in several dimensions of historical commentary. Social and political narratives must record it; students of Whiggery, Russell, reform or radicalism, must give it place and plausibility; it is a turning point for the historian of education; and it provides a case study for the investigation of government growth in the nineteenth century.

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.

Successive governments in Britain took great steps towards a more democratic form of government between 1911 and 1928. Universal suffrage, first proposed tentatively by a government in the former year, was completed in the latter. In the same period, the house of lords - the rejuvenation of which was treated at least nominally as vital by both the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition in 1911 - was effectively relegated even by Conservatives to an unimportant role. The attitudes and policies of Conservative politicians towards these changes deserve study for diverse reasons. They were part of a national debate about the wisdom of progress towards democracy; and so they form an important chapter in the development of political attitudes. They also do much to explain both how the process of democratization occurred, and how post-war governments viewed the electorate, as Conservatives participated in or dominated governments for most of the years from 1915 to 1945. Finally, the importance of Conservative views has been overlooked by historians, because they have persistently pre-dated the trend to democracy in Britain and so underestimated the scale of controversy about it. These historiographical tendencies are illustrated by the still lingering myth that the franchise before 1914 was close to manhood suffrage, or by the hitherto general assumption that the reform bill of 1917–18 was uncontroversial.

The overwhelming majority of studies of the relationship between the British government and private industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are, in reality, merely studies of the government's policy towards industry. The attitude of private industry towards the government has been almost entirely neglected, and this has inevitably led to a distorted understanding of the relationship as a whole. It is, for example, hardly ever made explicit in the extensive literature on the growth of state intervention in the British economy that in the decades before 1914 the assault on laissez-faire was pardy led by private industry itself. This development was most noticeable overseas, where the British government became involved in commerce and trade largely in response to requests for diplomatic support from British firms faced with growing competition from continental and American commercial interests, often supported by their respective governments.

In December 1930 Sir Victor Wellesley, the deputy under secretary at the Foreign Office, and its expert on Far Eastern finance, circulated a 29-page ‘Proposal for the establishment of a Politico-Economic Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office.’ This memorandum was prompted by the growing importance of tariffs, and various forms of investment, as instruments of foreign policy, and concern at his colleagues' failure to understand the political consequences. With economic nationalism in the ascendant, Wellesley recognized that Britain soon would have to consider whether she would ‘take part in the scramble for economic hegemony’. He hoped Cabinet would decide against tariffs and imperial preference, but was worried that the Foreign Office would be ill-equipped to defend this viewpoint. It was not that the Office lacked adequate sources of economic information, but rather that the division of duties between the Department of Overseas Trade and the Foreign Office precluded their assimilation with political appreciations. Although seventy five per cent of the work of the average mission was economic or commercial, this was generally left to the commercial counsellor, who reported directly to the Department of Overseas Trade. Political dispatches were forwarded to the appropriate Foreign Office department and there examined in virtual isolation. Moreover, the dominant attitude of mind among senior diplomats was, if not actually predisposed against economic work, at least so lacking in understanding that their efforts were often misdirected.

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.

On the morning of Saturday 25 October 1924 Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, was woken by the sound of J. H. Thomas, the colonial secretary, hammering on his bedroom door. ‘Get up, you lazy devil!’ Thomas is reported to have said. ‘We';re bunkered.’ What Thomas really said was probably more vivid but less printable. The cause of his excitement was the publication of the Zinoviev letter, the greatest Red Scare in British political history. Allegedly written by Zinoviev, president of the communist International, to the British Communist party on 15 September 1924. this sinister document instructed British Communists to put pressure on their sympathizers in the Labour party, to ‘strain every nerve’ for the ratification of the recent treaty with the Soviet Union, to intensify ‘agitation-propaganda work in the armed forces’, and generally to prepare for the coming of the British revolution. A copy of the letter was first obtained by the Daily Mail, then circulated by the Mail to the rest of Fleet Street. It was published in the press four days before the general election of 29 October 1924, at a critical moment in the life of the first Labour government. Until its publication Labour leaders felt their election campaign was going well. Afterwards they changed their minds.

An economic theory implies an ethical system, a political purpose, and a psychological hypothesis. Throughout almost the entire nineteenth century in Britain laissez-faire capitalism, with its concomitant values of personal thrift and industry, parliamentary government, and promise of social mobility through self-improvement, was triumphant. Many, if not most, Englishmen believed that the classical political economists had discovered and formulated the ‘laws of political economy’ in the same ineluctable manner that Isaac Newton had determined the laws of physics. ‘To many’, as G. Kitson Clark has written, the political economists ‘were the best minds in the country whose teaching it was folly to question and disastrous to disobey’. However much Englishmen might deplore the social and human consequences of the operation of the ‘laws of political economy’, most were convinced that opposition to those ‘laws’ was futile.

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.

The possibility of Viscount Grey's return to active political life after his resignation from the Foreign Office in 1916 is one which historians have treated with understandable scepticism. Grey's well-documented distaste for political intrigue, his love of things pastoral and aesthetic, his failing health in general and eyesight in particular and hispatent joy at being released from office in 1916 lend force to the thoughtthat he was never likely to be brought back to the world of politics. ‘[H]e was always too blind and often too ill to lead a party, or to aspire to office,’ his friend and biographer G. M. Trevelyan wrote a few years after Grey's death; and more recendy Professor Robbins, whilst he concedes that there was a political dimension within Grey's make-up which Trevelyan was wont to ignore, likewise examines the period after 1916 rather dismissively. One consequence of this view of Grey's political biography has been the neglect of what has been seen to be an attempt on the part of some Liberals to remove Asquith from the leadership of the Liberal party in 1921 and to substitute Grey. The assumption has been that because Grey personally was likely to have been a poor conspirator, conspiracies involving him must have been unpromising or trivial. It is, on the contrary, the point of this article to suggest that the Grey conspiracy of 1921 should be seen as a significant development in the three-party situation which characterized post-war politics; and to argue that the conspiracy had little to do with Grey and a great deal to do with other politicians, of diverse background, party affiliation, position and ambition, who were looking for a new way to obtain some purchase on the politics of the centre.

There is no longer any excuse for thinking of the Third Reich as a model totalitarian monolith. That simplistic assumption was questioned by some of the earliest observers of the period, and has never been seriously rehabilitated. But the task of examining its actual complexities is much more challenging than a description of any putatively monolithic construct would be, for there will not be a single ‘key‘ to an acknowledged polycratic structure. The challenge is, then, to accept the limitations of a necessarily monographic approach, but to avoid losing sight of the broader perspective - the dynamics of the Nazi regime as a whole.

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.

A problem of crucial importance confronted the British labour movement in the 1920s. The working class - those who earned their livelihood by selling their labour power, as well as their dependents - constituted a majority of the population. To the left it seemed manifest that their interests lay in ending a social system which exploited them and putting socialism in its place. Yet during the decade only a minority of British voters committed themselves to socialism, even at the minimal level of voting for the Labour party. As Philip Snowden lamented, ‘the very people for whom [the socialist] works and sacrifices are often indifferent and seldom show any gratitude’. Why did the British working class lack class consciousness?