In spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writers the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a ‘middlebrow’ novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘metropolitan’. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elite; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.

The rebellion against Charles I's authority that began in Edinburgh in 1637 involved the Scots in successive invasions of England and armed intervention in Ireland. Historians have almost universally taken a negative view of Scottish involvement in these wars, because it has been assumed that the Scottish political leadership sacrificed all other considerations in order to pursue an unrealistic religious crusade. This article suggests that aspects of the Anglo-Scottish relationship need to be reappraised. Using estimates of English payments to the Scots during the 1640s, it will be argued that the Scottish leadership made pragmatic political decisions based on a practical appreciation of the country's military and fiscal capacity. Substantial payouts from the English parliament enabled the Scottish parliamentary regime to engage in military and diplomatic activities that the country could not otherwise have afforded. The 1643 treaty that brought the Scots into the English Civil War on the side of parliament contrasts favourably with the 1647 Engagement in support of the king. It will be shown that, although the English parliament did not honour all of its obligations to the Scots, it does not automatically follow that the alliance was a failure in financial terms.

We have recently been reminded of the existence of a ‘missing dimension’ in national security affairs, namely the whole question of secret intelligence and clandestine operations. It can also be suggested that the question of internal security has traditionally represented another gap, though one that occurs for very different reasons. Traditionally, secret intelligence was often unavailable as a subject for comment or academic study precisely because of its secrecy. Internal security included some areas of sensitive political surveillance that fell into the same category; but continued across the spectrum to regular uniformed police work, a subject apparently too mundane and obvious for inclusion in accounts of political history. Police of all categories belong, it seems, to social rather than political history – the world of ‘history with the politics left out’.

As a result of the Great War, the Zionist movement came of age. For the first time since its inception as a political organization, Zionism gained a backer of international and worldwide repute. The political charter which Herzl had hawked around the chancelleries of Europe found its consummation in the Balfour Declaration. The British Empire, in its moment of supreme crisis, stamped its seal of approval on the concept of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

In Nigeria, Britain asserted its post-colonial security role during and immediately after the transfer of power, and remained responsible for assisting the Nigerian armed forces. While the Americans recognized Nigeria's potential as an important partner in the Cold War, they preferred to focus on development aid. Washington was thus supposed to complement British assistance, while leaving the responsibility for the security sector to London. But with the escalation of the Cold War in Africa, the Nigerians’ efforts to reduce their dependency on the United Kingdom, and Nigeria's growing significance for the United States in African affairs, this Anglo-American burden-sharing was increasingly questioned in Washington. The United States thus eventually decided to militarize its aid policy towards Nigeria. In analysing the militarization of US aid policy towards Nigeria, this article will, first, assess the Anglo-American relationship in the early 1960s; secondly, position Nigeria in American Cold War policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa; thirdly, question the role of military assistance in Washington's policy towards Nigeria and Africa; and fourthly, discover the regional and local factors that influenced policy-makers in Washington and London.

Recent archival research has elucidated the German purpose in sending Joel Brand to Istanbul in May 1944 to negotiate the exchange of Hungarian jews for ‘goods’. Himmler's aim was to enlist the zionist leadership in an effort to detach the western allies from Russia and obtain a separate peace. It is also known now that the allies were initially willing to ‘keep the door open’ by negotiation, but suddenly broke off contacts in July. And we know too how Moshe Shertok – the jewish agency's ‘foreign secretary’ – was tricked by a British promise that Brand would be allowed after meeting him in Aleppo to return to Budapest.

Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s. By I. Lukes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+318. ISBN 0-1951-0267-3. £22.50.

Carpatho–Ukraine in the twentieth century: a political and legal history. By V. Shandor. Cambridge, MA: distributed by Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1998. Pp. xvii+321. ISBN 0-9164A-5886-5. £21.95.

Czechoslovak national interests, Part I: A historical survey of Czechoslovak national interests, Part II: Reflections on the demise of Czechoslovak communism. By Oskar Krejčí. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Pp. 193, 167. ISBN 0-8803-3343-X. £31.00

The American publisher Charles Francis Hall had no previous experience with the Arctic before he travelled there in 1860. Yet, Hall transformed himself into an Arctic authority, and was given command of a United States governmental funded expedition in 1870. Hall was only able to undertake his work in the Arctic because of his relationship with Tookoolito and Ipiirvik, a married Inuit couple from Cumberland Sound, and this article examines the structural processes that enabled Hall to rescript their expertise as his own. Tookoolito and Ipiirvik travelled with Hall for over a decade, a relationship where the unequal power-dynamic was continuously transformed and renegotiated in the United States and the Arctic. Drawing on recent historiographical insights on the construction of exploration knowledge in the imperial context, this article interrogates the epistemic and physical violence involved in Hall's erasure of Tookoolito and Ipiirvik's expertise and personhood. In doing so, I highlight the structural function of the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and labour in the production of nineteenth-century European and Euro-American Arctic science, and its enduring influence on the historiography.

The repeal of the sacramental test in the Corporation and Test Acts seemed far more important in later years than when it was carried. In 1828 the event aroused comparatively little opposition, and it is not much of an exaggeration to say that ‘the repeal took place with amazing smoothness. Hardly a dog barked.’ The practical change made by repeal was scarcely perceptible. Repeal merely confirmed and strengthened the liberty enjoyed under Annual Indemnity Acts, while dissenters still found it difficult to enter some town councils until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 caused a striking influx of them to take place. Despite the lack of concern in 1828, the duke of Newcastle claimed in 1837 that ‘a sure consequence’ of repeal was the emancipation of catholics in 1829; that, as a consequence of this in turn, ‘liberalism, conciliation, and concession, prevailed without limit’ and that, ultimately, by an incredible combination of terms, ‘Jesuitical influence triumphed, and the Reform Bill was carried…Revolution was forcibly established.’ Neither the advocates of repeal in parliament, nor those politicians who acquiesced in it, expected that catholic emancipation would follow as a necessary consequence, though the former hoped that this cause would be encouraged. Even further removed, in 1828, seemed a wide measure of parliamentary reform. When this did come in 1832 it opened to dissenters a share in political power which was not envisaged four years before and gave greater importance to the change of 1828. Members of Oxford university showed this in 1863 when remonstrating with one of their M.P.s, W. E. Gladstone, for favouring the removal of the declaration adopted in place of the sacramental test in 1828

The Government which Lord Russell formed on Palmerston's death in October 1865 met Parliament first on 6 February 1866. On 12 March it introduced a Reform Bill, the chief objects of which were to lower the Borough Franchise of 1832 from £10 rental to £7 and the County Franchise from £50 to £14, and to give votes to £50 Savings Bank depositors, £10 lodgers and certain others (enfranchising altogether about 400,000 new voters). On 7 May it introduced a Seats Bill which provided for grouping of boroughs with populations smaller than 8000 and removal of second seats from small towns with two members; and which proposed to distribute the 49 seats thus freed so that Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Salford and London would have 10 new seats between them, Scotland 7, London University and a number of new boroughs 1 each and the English counties 26 in all. These measures were recommended by Gladstone, as Leader of the House of Commons, in the hope, which the Queen shared, that they would put an end to the reform question for a generation. Their authors, Russell and Gladstone, intended them to wind up the line of abortive measures which had been presented to Parliament in the previous seventeen years: they expected, innocently as it turned out, that a degree of enfranchisement which the Cabinet had accepted, however reluctantly, which had been tailored in order to pass through Parliament and ‘which we had so much cut down…from the standard of the Palmerston measure of 1860 would be accepted by the Liberal majority in the House of Commons.