Contemporary Review articles from January 2001

Contemporary Review archives from January 2001

The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain. Gerwin Strobl. Cambridge University Press. [pound]25.00/US$44.95. 274 pages. ISBN 0-521-44090-4. As the author states, 'the German image of Britain was a significant factor in the course of the...

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modem World.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modem World. Roy Porter. Allen Lane: The Penguin Press. [pound]25.00. 728 pages. ISBN 0-71-399152-6. In this challenging new study, the Professor of the Social History of Medicine in University...

Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modem Britain.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modem Britain. Keith Wrightson. Yale University Press. [pound]25.00. 372 pages. ISBN 0-300-08391-2. This study, part of Yale's 'New Economic History of Britain', is an attempt 'to make sense of the...

Dictionary of Wars.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Dictionary of Wars. George Childs Kohn. Fitzroy Dearbom Publishers. [pound]50.00. 614 pages. ISBN 1-57958-204-4. This dictionary, which covers more than 4000 years of man's history and includes over 1800 entries, is a revision of the first...

The History Today Who's Who in British History.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... The History Today Who's Who in British History. Juliet Gardiner, editor. Collins & Brown and Cima Books. [pound]25.00. 870 pages. ISBN 1-85585-771-5. This biographical dictionary contains over 4,000 entries supervised by a team of six...

Lord Acton.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Lord Acton. Roland Hill. Yale University Press. [pound]25.00/US$39.95. 548 pages. ISBN 0-300-07956-7. Lord Acton was Victorian Britain's most famous Catholic and one of the century's great historians. He was descended from an ancient...

Cavaliers: The Royalist Army at War 1642-1646.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Cavaliers: The Royalist Army at War 1642-1646. John Barratt. Sutton Publishing. [pound]19.99/US$34.95. 244 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2027-0. The author, a widely recognised military historian, here carries on the work begun in the 1950s to re-evaluate...

The Image of Georgian Bath 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage and History.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... The Image of Georgian Bath 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage and History. Peter Borsay. [pound]55.00. Oxford University Press. 434 pages. ISBN 0-19-820265-2. No one who reads eighteenth century fiction or studies eighteenth century politics cannot be...

Europe, 1783-1914.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Europe, 1783-1914. William Simpson and Martin Jones. Routledge. [pound]50.00 h.b. and [pound]15.99 p.b. 388 pages. ISBN 0-415-22659-7 h.b. and 0-415-22660-0 p.b. This book might appear as a text-book aimed only at students or undergraduates but...

Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service. Richard J. Aldrich. Cambridge University Press. [pound]22.95/US$34.95 500 pages. ISBN 0-521-64186-1. This exhaustively researched book looks at 'the...

The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swan. Victor Gollancz. [pound]20.00. 640 pages. ISBN 0-575-06243-6. The obsession of certain types of historians and biographers with the 'crimes' of Richard...

The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343. R. R. Davies. Oxford University Press. [pound]15.99. 213 pages. ISBN 0-19-820849-9. This book began its life as the 1998 Ford Lectures which were used by Professor...

Contemporary Germany: Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Contemporary Germany: Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society. Mark Allinson, Jeremy Leaman, Stuart Parkes and Barbara Tolkiehn. Longman. [pound]19.99. 423 pages. ISBN 0-582-35714-4. This collection of essays and texts is aimed not...

Encyclopedia of Conflicts Since World War II.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Encyclopedia of Conflicts Since World War II. James Ciment and Kenneth Hill, editors. Two Volumes. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. [pound]175.00. 1405 pages. ISBN 1-57958-181-1. It is a sad comment on the last century that discussions of its...

Making Foreign Policy: A Certain Idea of Britain.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Making Foreign Policy: A Certain Idea of Britain. John Coles. John Murray. [pound]17.99. 224 pages. ISBN 0-7195-6046-2. Mr Coles' career in the Foreign Office lasted for thirty-seven years and he retired as Permanent Under-Secretary at the...

Roman Oxfordshire.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Roman Oxfordshire. Martin Henig & Paul Booth with Tim Allen. Sutton Publishing. [pound]25.00. 244 pages. ISBN 0-7509-19590. The twentieth century has seen (or saw, depending on when one defines its end) an explosion in archaeological research....

The Demography of Victorian England and Wales.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... The Demography of Victorian England and Wales. Robert Woods. Cambridge University Press. [pound]45.00/US$69.95. 447 pages. ISBN 0-521-78254-6. Between 1837 and 1914 England and Wales underwent one of the most profound changes (if we exclude the...

The Third Reich: A New History.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... The Third Reich: A New History. Michael Burleigh. Macmillan. [pound]25.00. 965 pages. ISBN 0-333-64487-5. This book is heralded as the first 'up-to-date, single-volume international history of Nazi Germany'. The author, who has already...

'Good and Proper Men' Lord Palmerston and the Bench of Bishops.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... 'Good and Proper Men' Lord Palmerston and the Bench of Bishops. Nigel Scotland. James Clarke & Co. [pound]40.00. 272 pages. ISBN 0-227-67946-6. How various Prime Ministers advise the Sovereign as to the choice of bishops in the Church of...

An Ungodly War: The Sack of Constantinople and the Fourth Crusade.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... An Ungodly War: The Sack of Constantinople and the Fourth Crusade. W. B. Bartlett. Sutton Publishing. [pound]20.00/US$29.95. 229 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2378-4. The Fourth Crusade of 1204, called by Pope Innocent IV to restore Christ's homeland to...

Late Medieval England 1399-1509.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... Late Medieval England 1399-1509. A. J. Pollard. Longman. [pound]16.99 p.b. 454 pages. ISBN 0-582-03135-4. This is the fourth and final volume in Longman's History of Medieval England. It begins with the death of John of Gaunt in 1399 and...

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY.(Bibliography)
January 1, 2001... Just as war dominated the twentieth century, so do new books on warfare dominate this month's new releases. JOHN MURRAY has recently published Gregor Dallas' 1918: War and Peace ([pound]25.00. 616 pages). This original study answers the...

LOOKING FOR JEAN MOULIN.
January 1, 2001... The Death of Jean Moulin. Patrick Marnham. John Murray. [pound]20.00. ISBN 0-7195-5919-7. When Patrick Marnham began his life of Jean Moulin he expected a straightforward account of an obvious hero. If the French Resistance had a leader it...

FINDING GOD AT CHRIST CHURCH.(Review)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... God and Goodness. Hugh Rice. Oxford University Press. [pound]19.99. 147 pages. ISBN 0-19-825028-2. Most twenty-first century believers are probably more concerned to walk with God than to define Him (or Her, or It). God is experience as...

KINGS OF THE HIMALAYAS.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Kingdoms Beyond the Clouds: Journeys in Search of the Himalayan Kings. Jonathan Gregson. Macmillan. [Pound]14.99. 510 pages. ISBN 0-333-76550-8. Monarchy, many will be surprised to learn, not only survives but is a revered institution in...

SPENDER AMONG THE MODERNISTS.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism. David Leeming. Duckworth. [pound]20.00. 288 pages. ISBN 0-7156-2948-4. David Leeming admits that this biography is not officially authorised and that he had only the reluctant permission of Spender to...

FRUSTRATED HUNGARY FLIRTS WITH FAR-RIGHT POLITICS.
January 1, 2001... PRIME Minister Victor Orban's conservative coalition administration is introducing a big, long-term infrastructure building programme intended to accelerate the growth of the Hungarian economy. Similar development master-plans may well be...

MEDIA REVIEW: TILE MAJOR GOVERNMENT.
January 1, 2001... THE broadcast media play an important role in recording contemporary history and in affecting the way we view politics and the social environment. Whilst academics are often involved in uncovering the minutiae of history, broadcasters are...

ROBERT RUBENS 1937--1998: A MEMOIR.
January 1, 2001... THERE is a stretch of London I associate with him, the Pimlico Road. Along it we would drive in his smoke-filled box of a car, to the fashionable church we attended, or the flat of the elderly aristocrat, herself now dead, whom he called his...

THE HISTORICAL MYOPIA OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS.
January 1, 2001... ALL nations are members of the community of nations and part of the international political system; each needs to deal in some measure with the other members. No one can stop the world and get off. We have to share the planet with each other,...

THE NEW BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND MIDDLE EAST REALITIES.
January 1, 2001... IN a nutshell, 'support for Israel' constituted the Middle East foreign policy prescription of presidential candidates Gore and Bush. Now that the elections are over, the incoming administration has an opportunity to re-evaluate U.S. Middle...

IN HARDY COUNTRY.
January 1, 2001... AS the Second World War drew to its close, I travelled by the 'Slow and Dirty' -- more properly known as the 'Somerset and Dorset' -- to begin a new life, following the death of my mother, in the small market town of Sturminster Newton which...

AFRICAN REFUGEES: SOME PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2001... I HAD just started school when I first came into contact with a refugee, two refugees, to be precise. The event was not particularly scary, curiosity characterized the whole thing. We suddenly found ourselves together in the office of the local...

JURY DUTY.
January 1, 2001... TRIAL by jury is a hallowed British institution. It represents the power of the people against the power of a potentially oppressive state. Yet curiously, when the summons to jury duty comes, many are reluctant to attend. Approximately a...

INDIAN MEMORIES IN TWO OF MEXICO'S CITIES.
January 1, 2001... OUR guide's voice came through loud and clear over the microphone as we left Mexico City, the largest urban centre in the world, for the city of Puebla. 'My name is Manuel, but I'm always confused about my name. When I enter a room where my...

BLUEPRINTS FOR A NEW HOUSE OF LORDS.(Review)
January 1, 2001... Reforming the House of Lords: Lessons from Overseas. Meg Russell. Oxford University Press. [pound]18.99. 368 pages. ISBN 0-19-829831-5. This solid and workmanlike book examines the Upper Houses of seven foreign Parliaments and contrasts...

FREEING EAST TIMOR.(Review)
January 1, 2001... The Crossing. A Story of East Timor. Luis Cardoso. Granta Books. [pound]9.99 p.b. 155 pages. ISBN 1-86207-352-X. Indonesia annexed East Timor by force in 1975-76, when the Portuguese, after 400 years of colonial presence left this part of...

AFRICA TODAY.(Review)
January 1, 2001... A History of the Church in Africa. Bengt Sundkler and Christopher Steed. Cambridge University Press. [pound]85.00/US$140.00. 1232 pages. ISBN 0-521-58342-X. Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda. A Journalist Reports from...