This communication follows the evolution, reception, and implications of the parliamentary commissioner's critical 1968 report on Foreign Office ‘maladministration’ regarding compensation for British concentration camp inmates. It explores officials' and ministers' attitude to the investigative techniques associated with this new office, as well as their hostile reaction to the publicity and parliamentary controversy to which his work gave rise. It concludes by exploring the wider implications of the case, especially the inherent problems faced by governments seeking closer and more harmonious relationships with the governed.

Interpretations that solely emphasize either continuity or controversy are found wanting. Historians still question how the English became Protestant, what sort of Protestants they were, and why a civil war dominated by religion occurred over a hundred years after the initial Reformation crisis. They utilize many approaches: from above and below, and with fresh perspectives, from within and without. Yet the precise nature of the relationship of the Reformation, the civil war, the interregnum and the Restoration settlement remains controversial. This review of recent Reformation historiography largely validates the current consensus of a balance of continuity and change, pressure for further reform and begrudging conformity. Yet ultimately it argues that continuity must form the foundation for any interpretation of the Reformation, for controversial or dramatic alterations to the status quo only made sense to contemporaries in the context of what had come before. Challenging ideas, like challenging individuals, did not exist in a vacuum devoid of historical context. The practical limits of possibility, constrained largely by the established norms and procedures, shaped the course of English Reformation. As such, practicality seems a unifying and central theme for current and future investigations of England's long Reformation.

Recent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.

During periods of recession, both historians and policy-makers have tended to revisit the multi-faceted relationship between health and economic crisis. It seems likely that the current economic downturn will trigger a new revival of efforts to gauge its implications for people's health around the world. This review will reflect on aspects of the relationship between health and economic crisis, exploring some of the unanswered questions within the historiography of the Great Depression and health, and suggest new directions that this work might take. Within a broadly transnational framework, I will reassess the diverse historiographies of interwar public health, in order to highlight ways in which the methodologies used could inspire future studies for neglected areas within this field, such as Southeast Asia. In doing so, I will illustrate that the effects of the interwar economic fluctuations on health status remain imprecise and difficult to define, but marked a transitional moment in the history of public health.

Fifty years have passed since the publication of The tragedy of American Diplomacy, the seminal work by New Left scholar William Appleman Williams. The work fired off one of the most important salvos of historical revisionism, heralding the arrival of the ‘Wisconsin School’ of American historiography. In examining the expansionist and consuming tendencies of American power and capital, Williams ushered in a movement which has left an enduring mark. Despite attacks on its credibility and an assortment of drawbacks, Tragedy remains a strong antidote to triumphalist narratives of American history, and pressingly important in the current political climate.

This article reviews the latest research on the making of the Anglo-Scottish parliamentary union of 1707 and unionism in modern Scotland. Stimulated by the tercentenary of the union, but running counter to the popular mood at the time of that anniversary, many of the recent publications exhibit a novel and sympathetic interest in principled support for union. Using Christopher Whatley's The Scots and the union (2006) and Colin Kidd's Union and unionisms (2008) as starting points, the article shows how the new histories differ from earlier work, while also identifying the interdisciplinary roots of the ‘unionist turn’ in Scottish history.

With France currently in the midst of a fierce public debate over its identité nationale, now is a very appropriate time to revisit one of the most controversial questions in modern French history: the definition of the nation. Taking a wide range of French and foreign authors from a variety of disciplines, this article shows how debates around the national narrative in France have developed in the past twenty years, as the country's intellectual class has come to terms with, amongst other things, the ‘post-colonial turn’, and the disintegration of Marxism.

Over the last forty years, the history of sexuality has developed into a vibrant historical genre. Despite the diversity of the resulting academic literature, within it is an often implicit focus on ‘marginal’ subjects. This historiographical review examines why this is the case, exploring the development of the history of sexuality and its theoretical underpinnings, before suggesting the ways in which this focus on the ‘marginal’ has limited resulting works. Finally, it suggests ways in which the historians might move forward, both by discussing some of the more provocative new texts and concepts within the field, and also by posing several questions for future study.