In September 1939, only a few weeks after the signature of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, the British government made perhaps its strongest effort since the Bolshevik revolution to achieve a rapproachement with the Soviet Union. This effort was interrupted and almost ruined by the Finno-Soviet ‘Winter War’, but the British initiative resumed after the war ended in March 1940. The Soviet government, though not the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiskii, was cool to British overtures, thus reversing the inter-war pattern where Moscow had often been the first to ask for better Anglo-Soviet relations. The publication of many Soviet diplomatic papers permits a comparison between Soviet and British accounts of important diplomatic meetings, a comparison which illustrates both British and Soviet foreign policy during the early months of the Second World War.

Portugal's presence in Guiné-Bissau through eleven years of intense guerrilla war was justified by the doctrine of ‘pluricontinentalim’. In this view concession to nationalist pressure in one part of the ‘indivisible state’ would lead inevitably to the collapse of the whole. The defence of Portuguese Guiné, therefore, was the price to be paid for the maintenance of the infinitely more valuable territories of Angola and Mozambique. While the Salazar regime was rigid in its adherence to this doctrine, some movement was detectable under his successor from 1968, Marcello Caetano. The governor-general in Guiné, General Spínola, was permitted to explore possibilities of negotiation. Politically insecure in the face of residual Salazarist power in the regime, however, Caetano abandoned this approach in 1972. This apparent loss of nerve would contribute to the overthrow of the Lisbon regime by its own military in 1974 – despite recently revealed secret talks between Lisbon and the Guinea nationalists on the very eve of the coup.

The Empty Chair Crisis of 1965–66 has traditionally been seen as a constitutional crisis, caused by the different European visions of General de Gaulle and the Commission president, Hallstein. This article will argue, however, that the root cause of the crisis was a clash over the programme of the EEC and, at a deeper level, about the leadership of the Community. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, it will suggest, used the 1965 common agricultural policy negotiations to challenge the traditionally prominent position of the French. In response, de Gaulle had little choice other than to escalate the crisis and launch a six-month boycott of Community institutions.

This article attempts to explain the heated controversy sparked by Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling book Hitler's Willing Executioners, by comparing it with its most obvious precedent: the international furor in 1960–62 over William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Through such a comparison, the Goldhagen controversy emerges as a relatively shallow event, largely driven by the book's own weaknesses and by media hype, that provides little of value for a deeper historical understanding of the Holocaust. At the same time, however, Goldhagen's surprising popularity in Germany does, in fact, signal a possible shift in the Germans' long postwar struggle to ‘come to terms' with the Nazi past.

Stuart Ball, The Conservative Party since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 205 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-7190-4012-4.

John Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–1996 (London: Macmillan, 1996), 283 pp., £16.99, ISBN 0-333-56293-3.

Alan Clark, The Tories: Conservatives and the Nation State 1922–1997 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 493 pp., £20.00, ISBN 0-297-81849-X.

N. J. Crowson, Facing Fascism: The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935–1940 (London: Routledge, 1997), 270 pp., £20.00, ISBN 0-415-15315-8.

Brendan Evans and Andrew Taylor, From Salisbury to Major: Continuity and Change in Conservative Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 288 pp., £14.99, ISBN 0-7190-4291-7.

Steven Ludlam and Martin J. Smith, Contemporary British Conservatism (London: Macmillan, 1996), 322 pp., £14.99, ISBN 0-333-62949-3.

Philip Norton (ed.), The Conservative Party (London: Prentice Hall, 1996), 264 pp., £15.95, ISBN 0-13-374653-4.

John Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 562 pp., £24.99, ISBN 0-002-55686-3.

John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden 1940–1957 (London: Longman, 1995), 350 pp., £57.50, ISBN 0-582-50463–5.

John Ramsden, The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath 1957–1975 (London: Longman, 1996), 485 pp., £70.00, ISBN 0-582-27570-9.

Anthony Seldon (ed.), How Tory Governments Fall (London: Fontana, 1996), 510 pp., £7.99, ISBN 0-00-686366-3.

Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds.), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 842 pp., £20.00, ISBN 0-19-820238-5.

Robert Self, The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters: The Correspondence of Sir Austen Chamberlain with his sisters Hilda and Ida, 1916–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1995), 548 pp., £40.00., ISBN 0-521-55157-9.

John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden 1940–1957 (London: Longman, 1995), 350pp., £57.50, ISBN 0-582-50463-5; The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath 1957-1975 London: Longman, 1996), 485pp., £70.00, ISBN 0-582-227570-9.

Herbert Kitschelt in collaboration with Anthony J. McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 323 pp., $49.50, ISBN 0-472-10663-5.

Peter Merkl and Leonard Weinberg (eds.), The Revival of Right Wing Extremism in the 90s (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 304 pp., £18.50/$24.50, ISBN 0-714-64207-X.

Urs Altermatt and Hanspeter Kriesi, L'Extrême droite en Suisse. Organisations et radicalisation au cours des années quatre-vingt et quatre-vingt-dix (Fribourg: Les Éditions Universitaires, 1995), 293 pp. (pb.), SFr. 42.00, ISBN 2-827-10727-9.

Mike Cronin (ed.), The Failure of British Fascism. The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (London: Macmillan, 1996), 182 pp. (hb.), £35.00, ISBN 0-333-58438-4.

Gerhard Feldbauer, Von Mussolini bis Fini. Die Extreme Rechte in Italien (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1996), 224 pp. (pb.), DM 29.40, ISBN 3-885-20575-0.

Helmut Reinalter, Franko Petri and Rüdiger Kaufmann (eds.), Das Weltbild des Rechtsextremismus. Entsolidarisierung und Bedrohng der Demokratie. Gesellschaftliche Bedingungen, Strukturen und Wirkungen rechtsextremen Denkens (Innsbruck/Vienna: Studienverlag, 1998), 576 pp., DM 82.00, ISBN 3-706-51258-0.

Tore Bjørgo, Racist and Right-Wing Violence in Scandinavia: Patterns, Perpetrators, and Responses (Oslo: Tano-Aschehoug, 1997), 386 pp., Kr 298.00, ISBN 8-251-83665-4.

Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo (eds.), Nation and Race: The Development of a Euro-American Racist Subculture (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 273 pp. (pb.), £19.00, ISBN 1-555-53331-0.

Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self. The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 264 pp., ISBN 0-801-43202-2.

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 303 pp., ISBN 0-520-20623-1.

Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 208 pp., ISBN 0-674-78475-8; originally published as Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell'Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993), 326 pp., ISBN 8-842-04384-2.

Giorgio Israel and Pietro Nastasi, Scienza e razza nell'Italia fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998), 408 pp., ISBN 8-815-06736-1.

Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes. Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 268 pp., ISBN 0-816-62562-X

Adolfo Scotto di Luzio, L'appropriazione imperfetta. Editori, biblioteche e libri per ragazzi durante il fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), 301 pp., ISBN 8-815-05559-2.

Martyn Cornick, The Nouvelle Revue Française under Jean Paulhan 1925–1940 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 224 pp., Fl. 65, $40.50, ISBN 9-051-83767-6.

Nicholas Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Postwar France: The Story of the ‘Hussards’ (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg Publishers, 1996), 218 pp. (hb.), £34.95, ISBN 1-859-73029-9.

Denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 256 pp. (pb.), £18.50, ISBN 0-674-21271-1.

Jeffrey Mehlman, Geneologies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 262 pp., hardcover, ISBN 0-521-47213-X.

Jennifer E. Milligan, The Forgotten Generation: French Women Writers of the Inter-War Period (New York and Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996), 236 pp. (pb.), £14.99, ISBN 1-859-73118-X.