The career of Thomas Dugard, the focus of this article, can be very briefly outlined. The son of a Worcestershire schoolmaster, Dugard was educated at Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, where his uncle Richard was an eminent tutor. Thomas gained his M.A. in 1633, and the same year became Master of Warwick school where he remained until he obtained the wealthy living of Barford, south Warwickshire in 1648. He kept this living until his death in 1683, by which time he had, by the skin of his teeth, been enrolled by the heralds amongst the Warwickshire gentry. Thomas Dugard was not considered worthy of an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, although his brother William, the schoolmaster and printer, and his son Samuel, a clergyman and author, are included.

On 2 April 1871, soon after the echoes of cannon fire had died away over Neuilly and Courbevoie in the first engagement of the civil war, the executive commission of the revolutionary Paris commune drafted an angry proclamation:

The royalist conspirators have attacked! Despite the moderation of our attitude they have attacked! No longer able to count on the French army, they have attacked with the pontifical zouaves and imperial police…This morning, Charette's Chouans, Cathelineau's Vendéens, Trochu's Bretons, flanked by Valentin's gendarmes…embarked on civil war against our National Guards.

In histories of European trade union movements, the observation that women industrial workers were rarely found among the membership has become axiomatic. In virtually every developed nation, it seems that once the industrial order was established, predominantly male trade unions were everywhere the rule, and female unions and trade unionists everywhere notable exceptions.

When Gladstone's Liberal government passed the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act in 1883, its supporters hoped that the future conduct of politics would be purer and more equitable. Not only would the grosser forms of corruption (such as bribery or intimidation) now be punished more severely, but the advantages previously enjoyed by wealthier candidates would now be minimized because the new law imposed strict limits on campaign spending which applied equally to all candidates for a particular constituency. But these noble goals, it soon appeared, were little closer to realization because the law contained a crucial loophole by failing to constrain the expenditure of the numerous pressure groups active in British politics. Because of this loophole, electoral corruption might continue to flourish, even if the perpetrator would no longer be the candidate's agent, but rather the pressure group treasurer. This view that the intent (if not the letter) of the law was being subverted was a common theme of Edwardian political journalism. As the Westminster Gazette observed, ‘when a by-election takes place each candidate has the assistance of a cloud of outside organizations which spend on the election a large sum of money which is not included in the official election expenses… clearly the result is to drive a coach-and-six through the Corrupt Practices Act.’ On the floor of the House of Commons similar arguments were aired. One Liberal MP contended that the statute ‘had been of great service in securing more honest representation than before, but no one who had followed political events closely could fail to see that its whole purpose was avoided, and that its terms were entirely circumvented, by the action which political organizations took on behalf of a candidate, which he was wholly unable to do for himself.’ Such assertions remained unsubstantiated, however, because infringements by pressure groups were rarely subjected to legal review in the election courts, being considered too difficult to define and expensive to prove.

On 31 March 1939, Britain, breaking with hitherto steadfastly pursued policy, declared her commitment to the defence of Poland in the event of a German attack. This gesture was a dramatic change in Britain's foreign policy, not merely in relation to one East European state, but more notably in relation to Europe as a whole. Not surprisingly, the declaration has been the focal point of historical attention, although the events following have received less attention. The crisis days of March 1939 saw a chain of events, not necessarily of the same origin or character but which in sum total caused disquiet in European capitals, most clearly in London. Because of this it is easy to over-look the long-term nature of some of the events which culminated in March 1939 and thus, in consequence, to overestimate the effect of the British guarantee upon Polish foreign policy.

Few fields of study are as frequently subject to revision as the history of contemporary politics. This is especially true for communist movements, where new interpretations constantly rework the old. The outpouring of recent work on the Partito comunista italiano (PCI) is a case in point. The peculiarity of Italian communism and the popularity of the PCI within Italy pose intriguing problems which have attracted the attention of many political scientists. In the search for answers to these questions, most authors also end up recounting the Party's history. Unfortunately, the inspiration for these projects is rarely historical per se, but is rather ‘scientific’, intended in the outdated sense of a discipline which extracts its subject from a specific environment in order the better to study it.

During the second world war, Syria and Lebanon lay on the fringe of the major Middle Eastern military campaigns fought between the Allied and Axis powers. They stood, however, at the focal point of relations between the British and the Free French, due to the anomalous situation which arose in the Levant states in 1941.

Ruth Williams was not a typist. She was apt to be put out when the newspapers called her that. In fact she was a secretary, a confidential clerk, with a firm of Lloyds' underwriters in London. On 30 September 1948, at a registry office in Kensington, she married Seretse Khama, heir to the chieftaincy of the Bangwato in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. No-one knew whether the Bangwato would accept a white consort. British newspapers ran features headed ‘Shall typist be a Queen?’ (Sunday Dispatch, 28 November 1948), and ‘This girl can upset the peace of Africa’ (Sunday Express, 10 July 1949). White opinion in South Africa was aghast: the marriage was condemned as ‘distasteful and disturbing’ (Johannesburg Star, 28 June 1949), as ‘striking at the root of white supremacy’ (Natal Witness, 2 July 1949). Ruth's parents opposed the marriage and did not attend the ceremony. Her father, George Williams, was a retired Indian army officer, working as a commercial traveller. Ruth was born in 1923, and brought up in Blackheath and Lewisham. She attended Eltham High School, took polytechnic classes in cookery, and served for four years in the war as a corporal-driver with the W.A.A.F. Together with her sister Muriel, she was a churchgoer, keenly interested in the African work of the London Missionary Society. They were constant visitors to the colonial students' hostel at Nutford Place in Bayswater. It was at an L.M.S. meeting in 1947 that she met Seretse, a quiet, friendly, relaxed and thoroughly Anglicized law student of twenty-seven, with an alert mind and honest manner. The sexual attraction between them was apparently strong. But there was also in their decision to marry a challenging element of anti-apartheid zeal. Ruth abhorred the colour bar, and felt she could do at least as much good in Bechuanaland as missionary wives had done.