On 24 April 1547 the forces of the leading protestant princes in Germany were annihilated at Miihlberg by Charles V, and the political wing of protestantism received a blow from which it never entirely recovered. Events during the preceding year had moved with a startling rapidity. Diplomats had widely expected a drawn contest in the summer of 1546, while John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse had sent a series of missions to France and England to request the military aid and intervention which might tip the balance decisively against the emperor. The diplomatic experts of the Schmalkaldic League had expected France to take advantage of the emperor's difficulties in Germany. The outbreak of war there might seem to have brought to fruition decades of French efforts to cripple the emperor by embroiling him with his German subjects, and 1546 certainly saw a culmination of French diplomatic activity across the Rhine. Yet the outcome of the frenetic negotiations which accompanied the war showed, on the part of the French, a lack of decisiveness at this critical time which is not easy to explain. Four years before, a grand anti-Habsburg coalition had been the pivotal point of French foreign policy. Now, in 1546, any chances of such a coalition were frittered away in petty negotiations with the English and a marked lack of faith between the French and the Germans.

The Convention Parliament, the revolutionary tribunal of the English Revolution of 1689, prohibited the printing of news of its affairs and barred the public from its debates. Authors, printers and publishers, however, defied these orders and published unlicensed accounts of speeches, votes, committee reports, and the membership of the Convention. Although the laws and administrative procedures which the later Stuarts had used to restrict the press were still in effect, they were not enforced. During the weeks of political crisis, quantities of news-sheets, newspapers and tracts reporting parliamentary news and political opinion appeared. At a time of growing scholarly and popular interest in the Glorious Revolution, it may be useful to examine the relationship between parliament and press. Although studies of the early press and of parliamentary reporting have been made, no detailed examination of these matters during the months of political upheaval in the winter of 1688–9 has been undertaken. Two central questions suggest themselves. How did the politically conscious public learn about what was happening in Westminster where their elected representatives and the peers of the realm were meeting to resolve the crisis facing the nation? What was the attitude of those representatives and peers to having information about their affairs spread beyond their chambers? The answers to such questions may deepen understanding of the Convention and of one aspect of the part played by the press in the Revolution.

The events of the Revolution of 1688 were the subject of an explosive pamphlet debate in which conservatives and radicals sought to capture the ideological initiative by imposing their rival interpretations upon events. The tories, who in large part brought about the Revolution, attempted to account for the nation's acceptance of the setdement in terms which could be accommodated within the traditional tory principles of non-resistance, hereditary right and monarchical prerogative. Recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which the settlement was a compromise between conflicting whig and tory attitudes to monarchy, and within die context of this revision of the ‘whig’ interpretation a number of the arguments deployed by tories in 1689 and in subsequent years have now been elucidated.

On 17 February 1827 Lord Liverpool suffered a paralytic stroke. His physical disintegration was followed by the break-up of the alliance which he had built and presided over for fifteen years. He had been a living guarantee that catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform could not be passed, which secured the support of the king and the country gentlemen. At the same time, he had guarded the backs of his liberal foreign and finance ministers against the threat of conservative attack, and thus enabled the government to adapt its policies in those departments to the pressures of the post-war world.

Historians have generally accepted the verdict that the 1902 Education Act was ‘among the two or three greatest constructive measures of the twentieth century’. Most have accepted likewise the interpretation laid down by the biographer of the Act's alleged author, Sir Robert Morant, that an educational crisis forced the Unionist government to begin thinking seriously about education. Their ineptitude, shown in attempts at legislation in 1900 and 1901, forced them to turn to the one man who could help, namely Morant, secretary to the vice president of the Board of Education, Sir John Gorst, and then to the president, the duke of Devonshire. Thus ‘Balfour, Hicks-Beach and Chamberlain had all to bow the knee to his [Morant's] ruthless tenacity in argument’, whilst Morant ‘had to show Balfour and the Cabinet how the policies of their party and their own inarticulate major premises inevitably led them to the 1902 Bill – as Morant was writing it’.

The overwhelming majority of studies of the relationship between the British government and private industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are, in reality, merely studies of the government's policy towards industry. The attitude of private industry towards the government has been almost entirely neglected, and this has inevitably led to a distorted understanding of the relationship as a whole. It is, for example, hardly ever made explicit in the extensive literature on the growth of state intervention in the British economy that in the decades before 1914 the assault on laissez-faire was pardy led by private industry itself. This development was most noticeable overseas, where the British government became involved in commerce and trade largely in response to requests for diplomatic support from British firms faced with growing competition from continental and American commercial interests, often supported by their respective governments.

On the morning of Saturday 25 October 1924 Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, was woken by the sound of J. H. Thomas, the colonial secretary, hammering on his bedroom door. ‘Get up, you lazy devil!’ Thomas is reported to have said. ‘We';re bunkered.’ What Thomas really said was probably more vivid but less printable. The cause of his excitement was the publication of the Zinoviev letter, the greatest Red Scare in British political history. Allegedly written by Zinoviev, president of the communist International, to the British Communist party on 15 September 1924. this sinister document instructed British Communists to put pressure on their sympathizers in the Labour party, to ‘strain every nerve’ for the ratification of the recent treaty with the Soviet Union, to intensify ‘agitation-propaganda work in the armed forces’, and generally to prepare for the coming of the British revolution. A copy of the letter was first obtained by the Daily Mail, then circulated by the Mail to the rest of Fleet Street. It was published in the press four days before the general election of 29 October 1924, at a critical moment in the life of the first Labour government. Until its publication Labour leaders felt their election campaign was going well. Afterwards they changed their minds.

There is no longer any excuse for thinking of the Third Reich as a model totalitarian monolith. That simplistic assumption was questioned by some of the earliest observers of the period, and has never been seriously rehabilitated. But the task of examining its actual complexities is much more challenging than a description of any putatively monolithic construct would be, for there will not be a single ‘key‘ to an acknowledged polycratic structure. The challenge is, then, to accept the limitations of a necessarily monographic approach, but to avoid losing sight of the broader perspective - the dynamics of the Nazi regime as a whole.