The English republican movement of the late 1860s and early 1870s has received meagre notice in standard historical accounts of the Victorian period. If viewed as no more than a notorious episode of the time English republicanism perhaps deserved no better; but, if considered as a persistent element of the radical tradition dating from the 1790s, coming to climax and then anti-climax in the 1870s, it merited more than mere passing attention. It has never been the subject of a single substantial historical work, and given that it was so inextricably bound up with other elements of nineteenth-century radicalism, perhaps it never will. Nevertheless, it has been accorded more than passing reference in the work of Royle, Gossman, Hardie and Harrison.

The advent of the Hitler regime in Germany in early 1933, with its emphasis on the overthrow of the Versailles- peace treaty restrictions and the re-militarization of German society, caused a fundamental shift in the focus of Bntish intelligence activity. Germany replaced Russia and the Comintern as the primary target. The arm of German military power which commanded the most attention was the Luftwaffe, Germany's new air force. The bomber was the only weapon with which Germany could directly threaten Britain; by which London and the industrial Midlands could be made vulnerable; which could strike at the civilian population. Out of this nexus of strategic anxieties, the air staff created their ‘worst-case’ assumption. The worst case, as the air ministry consistently saw it during the 1930s, was a massive German air attack launched against Great Britain with the object of forcing a quick surrender, primarily through the collapse of civilian morale. Group Captain J. C. Slessor, director of plans in the air ministry (and a future chief of the air staff), admitted in his memoirs that,’ in those years immediately before the war the possibility of what was referred to as the knock-out blow bore very heavily on the minds of the Air Staff’.

The Osborne judgment is always mentioned in political histories of the early twentieth century as one of the two principal judgments affecting the trade unions and the growth of the Labour party-the other being the Taff Vale decision of 1901. In both cases officers of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants were acting upon what they believed to be constitutional lines; in both cases, after lawsuits which went to the highest court in the land, the House of Lords, they were found to be behaving illegally; and in both cases parliament was eventually persuaded, if not precisely to reverse the Lords’ decision, at least to modify the law drastically in the unions’ favour. The repercussions upon the Lords themselves were not insignificant: the ordinary voter found it difficult to distinguish between the judicial and the legislative functions of the Upper House; and so both cases strengthened the willingness of trade unionists to support the Liberal government in its constitutional struggle against the Lords. Such was the outcome of Disraeli's decision in 1875 to retain the final appeal to the Lords, despite Gladstone's attempt, in the Judicature Act of 1873, to abolish it altogether.

In his autobiography, Joseph Arch recalled a trial which had taken place in Bedford in 1875, and which had caused much local dissatisfaction:

Samuel Dawson, a farm labourer aged fifty-seven, whose wages averaged twelve shillings a week, was sent to Bedford gaol for two months with hard labour…because he could not pay one shilling a week towards the maintenance of his parents… It was a cruel business and it touched scores and scores of labourers on the raw^-fof'this question of maintaining parents was a burning one.

On Sunday 20 February 1938, Anthony Eden, accompanied by the cheers of the waiting crowd, left the foreign office for an emergency cabinet session. That same evening he tendered his resignation as foreign secretary. Ten years later Churchill recollected his feelings on learning of the news.

In spite of occasional protests Lord Beaverbrook's narrative of British domestic politics during the first world war seems to retain the authority of a primary source. This is particularly true of the passages in Politicians and the war, 1914–1916 which cover the events in which he, then Sir Max Aitken, claimed to have taken an influential part. Mr A. J. P. Taylor in his appraisal of Beaverbrook's second volume covering the fall of Asquith in 1916 declares: ‘ It provides essential testimony for events during a great political crisis — perhaps the most detailed account of such a crisis ever written from the inside... The narrative is carried along by rare zest and wit, yet with the detached impartiality of the true scholar. ‘ Beaverbrook's apparent advantages might well seem conclusive. He was a contemporary agent as well as observer, summed up in his jaunty ‘ I was there!’. He was supposed to have enjoyed the complete confidence of Bonar Law, to have run a newspaper and to have kept a diary. An M.P. and virtual parliamentary private secretary to Bonar Law, whose rise to the Commons party leadership he appeared to have engineered, Aitken could be presumed to be politically on the ‘inside’. A tycoon of Canadian business ‘mergers’ and a self-made millionaire at a young age, he was esteemed by Law to be one of the cleverest men he knew.

The Conservative party's preparations for the 1929 general election have been harshly treated by historians. Because the election was lost, they have understandably concentrated on explaining the defeat and so looked for weaknesses in Conservative leadership, policies and organization. It is also understandable that in the light of subsequent economic analysis, the Conservative election platform of ‘Safety First’ has suffered badly from comparison with the Keynesian-style policies of the Liberal party programme, We can conquer unemployment. But the contention here is that all too easily such hindsight has impeded a proper understanding of Conservative policies and tactics.

The C.I.A. was taxed with five major intelligence failures by the influential New York Herald Tribune on 2 August 1950. This newpaper article was only part of a widespread campaign to reorganize the C.I.A. The concern of the C.I.A. director, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, over the allegations was so acute that on the following day he prepared an apologia sent to President Truman. Three of the alleged failures of prediction concerned the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists, events in Palestine and the 1948 Bogota conference – the last now largely forgotten but the cause of great contemporary scandal when Secretary of State Marshall was attacked by a mob. The other two were in Europe. They were the inability to predict the fall of Czechoslovakia and the defection of Tito. Blaming the C.I.A. for not predicting the communist coup in Czechoslovakia was unfair, but there was more substance to the accusation concerning Yugoslavia.

On 10 May 1940, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. The same day Churchill became prime minister. The coincidence of these events was symptomatic of the subsequent relationship between British politics and British strategy. Churchill's coming to power was identified with the start of the real war. His remaining there would largely depend on the way in which he appeared to execute it.

Not the least significant constitutional difference between Britain and many continental states in the nineteenth century lay in the sphere of formal arrangements for the exercise of power during civil emergencies. Britain had no clearly understood concept of notrecht or of 'state of siege’. This omission certainly reflected the absence of foreign invasion as much as the feebleness of domestic revolutionary threats. Internal emergencies occurred, indeed, with a frequency hard to square with the old Whig interpretation; but while they often alarmed the authorities, none of them proved so formidable as not to be amenable to control by the civil power backed up by fairly small numbers of troops. A good deal of emergency legislation was passed until the 1820s, but thereafter a marked decline in the incidence and severity of violent disturbance, and in the violence of the government's responses, set in. The threat of revolution in Britain itself, in so far as it had ever existed, had faded. The terrible uncertainties revealed by the 1831 Bristol riots could be optimistically put aside: magistrates could get by with ‘reading the Riot Act’ and trusting to luck, and perhaps a few dragoons or yeomanry.