Marian devotion has long been a central component of Catholic spirituality, in part because the image of the Virgin has been accommodated effectively within so many diverse cultural contexts. In modern Poland, Marianism gained much of its power from the way it linked seemingly contradictory models of femininity together within a national (or even nationalist) worldview. Mary, the Queen of Poland, has been offered to the faithful as a model for conceptualising the feminine within the nation, a model which is flexible enough to endure because it rests on a basic dichotomy: on the one hand, Mary is a powerful, sometimes militant, protector of Poland; on the other, she is an exemplar of feminine domesticity. She provides an image of authority and power which ultimately (perhaps paradoxically) poses little challenge to traditional norms of femininity – indeed, she is frequently called upon to fortify those norms. Marianism thus provides some of the glue that helps hold together two otherwise distinct strains of Polish national thought, one focused on maintaining conservative gender relations and the other on attaining victory in the international realm.

This article considers whether the Franco regime pursued a genocidal policy against Republicans after the formal ending of hostilities on 1 April 1939. In post-war Spain, the primary mechanism for punishing Republicans was military tribunals. Francoist military justice was based on the assumption that responsibility for the civil war lay with the Republic: defendants were tried for the crime of ‘military rebellion’. This was, as Ramón Serrano Suñer admitted his memoirs, ‘turning justice on its head’. But although it was extremely harsh, post-war military justice was never exterminatory. The article stresses that the institutionalisation of military justice from 1937, following the arbitrary murders of 1936, contributed to a relative decline in executions. Although the regime's determination to punish Republicans for ‘military rebellion’ inevitably led to the initiation of tens of thousands of post-war military investigations, only a minority of cases ended in execution. This was especially the case from January 1940, when the higher military authorities ended the autonomy of military tribunals over sentencing. This reassertion of central control in January 1940 was part of a wider policy to ease the self-inflicted problem of prison overcrowding; successive parole decrees led to a substantial and permanent decrease in the number of inmates by 1945. Allied victory in the Second World War did not mark the beginning but the end of the process of bringing to a close mass military justice.

Using the fine arts exhibition of the Venice Biennale as a case study, this article considers the role of the Italian national government's cultural policy in pursuing its key domestic and foreign concerns between 1948 and 1958. These were, respectively, suppressing communism at home, and promoting Western European unification and Italy's role within it. By scrutinising their involvement at the Biennale, it aims to show the importance placed not only by the Italian Christian Democrats but also by their European counterparts on constructing the idea of a culturally integrated Western Europe as a vital complement to analogous economic and political initiatives.

This article details the year 1989 in the East German District Perleberg up to the fall of the Wall as reflected in the documents of the Ministry for State Security – the Stasi. It seeks to introduce empirical evidence on the course of the revolution in the towns of East Germany, an area which has received much less scholarly attention than larger centres. The article argues that in this particular outlying district, the generally accepted key factors behind the revolution (regime implosion, the changing international situation and popular pressure) are valid, but would best be weighted away from the changing international situation to the advantage of the other two. Furthermore, the evidence from District Perleberg suggests that pervasive state control, rather than accommodation and limited spheres for manoeuvre, was the dominant feature in 1989 in East Germany

Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 436 pp., £18.99 (pb), ISBN 0415196167.

L. J. Butler, Britain and Empire. Adjusting to a Post-imperial World (London: Tauris, 2000), 249 pp., £14.99 (pb), ISBN 186064449X.

Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur, eds., Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 248 pp., £55.00 (hb), ISBN 0333791800.

Nicola Labanca, Oltremare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 569 pp., pb, €20.00, ISBN 8815089594.

Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 332 pp., $60.00 (hb), ISBN 0521386632.

Emanuelle Sibeud, Une Science Impériale pour l'Afrique? (Paris: EHESS, 2002), 356 pp., €32.00, ISBN 2713217849.

Mary Sutphen and Bridie Andrews, eds., Medicine and Colonial Identity (London: Routledge, 2003), 160 pp., £58.00 (hb), ISBN 0415288800.

Isabel Vincent, Hitler's Silent Partners. Swiss Banks, Nazi Gold, and the Pursuit of Justice (New York: W. Morrow, 1997), 351 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0688154255.

Angelo M. Codevilla, Between the Alps and a Hard Place. Switzerland in World War II and the Rewriting of History (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000), 248 pp., $27.95, ISBN 089526238X.

Walther Hofer and Herbert R. Reginbogin, Hitler, der Westen und die Schweiz, 1936–1945 (Zürich: Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2001), 690 pp., €45.00, ISBN 3858239925.

Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War, Switzerland, National Socialism and the Second World War (Zürich: Pendo, 2002), 600 pp., €29.90, ISBN 3858426032.

Jakob Tanner and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Gedächtnis, Geld und Gesetz. Vom Umgang mit der Vergangenheit des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Zürich: Vdf Hochschulverlag, 2002), 380 pp., €29.90, ISBN 3728126586.

Neville Wylie, Britain, Switzerland, and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 394 pp., £55.00, ISBN 0198206909.

Youssef Chatani, Dissension among Allies: Ernest Bevin's Palestine Policy between Whitehall and the White House, 1945–1947 (London: Saqi Books, 2002), 156 pp., £25.00 (hb), ISBN 0–86356–999.

Moshe Gat, Britain and the Conflict in the Middle East, 1964–1967: The Coming of the Six-Day War (London: Praeger, 2003), 216 pp., £39.99 (hb), ISBN 0–27597–514–2.

Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East, 2nd edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 684 pp., £19.95 (pb), ISBN 1–86064–811–8.

Robert McNamara, Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East 1952–1967: From the Egyptian Revolution to the Six Day War (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 308 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 0–71465–397–7.

Jonathan Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 252 pp., £52.50 (hb), ISBN 0–33398–451–X.