Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) is now widely known as the father of revisionism and one of the more important progenitors of democratic socialism. What is often still overlooked is that almost all his theoretical work (an attempt to update the thought of Karl Marx in the light of the changed conditions of advanced capitalism) was done in England during his London exile (1888–1901) and that for the last three decades of his life he was a practising politician who manifested a close, informed and overriding interest in the major political issues of the era. Almost without interruption between 1902 and 1928 he served as a Social Democratic deputy in the German Reichstag, where he functioned as one of the SPD's principal foreign policy and taxation spokesmen. He was most influential within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) before and during the First World War, increasingly less effective after 1914. An outline of Bernstein's views on German foreign policy during the period when he was at the height of his authority as an active socialist politician thus promises to fill a gap in existing scholarship and to shed new light on the father of revisionism and his progeny.

The necessity for the United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) arose from a crisis in relations between the island's Greek and Turkish communities precipitated by an attempt on the part of President Makarios in November 1963 to adjust the 1960 Constitution in such a way as to lessen the influence of the Turkish minority within the state's institutions. An early unsuccessful attempt at mediation by Britain in the first weeks of 1964 (which aimed at a solution within the context of Nato) gave way to Security Council consideration at a series of meetings in February and March which resulted in a motion to dispatch a peacekeeping force.

It may come as a surprise to many that the international community through the mechanisms and methods of international law should seek to involve itself in the techniques of war-making to the extent that it does. We all accept that international law is deeply concerned with the prevention of the use of armed force and most people are aware, if in a rudimentary fashion, of the categories of aggression, self-defence, use of force to protect nationals and so forth. It would be a cause of great amazement should the rules and techniques of international law not be heavily engaged in constraining as far as possible the impulses of states to resort to the use of force. It is rather different to find international law actually descending to the battlefield, tacitly acknowledging its own failures, and attempting to pontificate on the types of weapons to be used in the destruction of life and property. Or is it? The same general concerns that impel international law to restrain states from using violence against each other are also operative when one considers the methods of warfare, despite the irony.

History is too important to be left to the historians. An individual or a society lacking an awareness of the past is as deprived as those who remain strangers to the world of imaginative literature. Moreover, anyone tempted to rely totally upon the pronouncements of professional historians for their ideas about earlier events still has to choose (even though the process is not always a conscious one) from among a wide range of versions and verdicts emanating from the ranks of those historians themselves.

For anyone interested in tracing the development of the comparative study of foreign policy behaviour the work of James Rosenau is central. His work in the 1960s was a major impetus in the formation of an identifiable research community in the United States; and the problems which he has addressed since that time have been the problems of comparative foreign policy analysis writ large. Above all, his work, exactly because it has attracted such sustained and widespread attention, has served as a focal point for a critique of the very possibility of the comparative analysis of foreign policy behaviour. Like it or loathe it, Rosenau's work represents the clearest and most extensive example of the comparative foreign policy school of thought.

Like Goodwin's collection, McMahan's book is entirely and Hare and Joynt's book largely concerned with the merits and demerits of nuclear deterrence; and so is one contribution (Edward Rogers') to Sims' collection. This latter work, besides other essays on ethical topics, is also concerned with international law and institutions, as is Geoffrey Best's essay in Goodwin. But the three works dealing with the ethics of deterrence are more internally cohesive, and prone to cross swords with one another, and it is these which deserve the greatest attention. Of these three, the books by McMahan and by Hare and Joynt are valuable contributions to applied moral philosophy, embodying the rigour in argument to be expected of philosophers, while the diverse standpoints expressed by theologians, strategists and the philosopher Barrie Paskins in the Goodwin collection, produced for the Council on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament (CCADD), are well compared and assessed in the volume's 'Concluding Comments' by Ronald Hope-Jones.