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Helen McCarthy writes of a ‘recent groundswell of scholarly interest in the League [of Nations]’, which was surveyed by Susan Pedersen in a 2007 review essay.(1) To this she adds my own 2009 book (2), which came out in time for her to notice, but not to use.

This book is a showcase for the work of some recently-successful doctoral scholars, nine of its ten contributors falling into this category. Most of them wrote their theses at British universities, but three did so in Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

In the autumn of 2011 the near-simultaneous publication of a number of books on the British Empire promised to add fresh momentum to the debate, if debate is the word, on the memories – or lack of them – that the British people currently carry for their empire.(1) Jeremy Paxman, with Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British, promised a robust, ‘clear-e

As a field, diplomatic history is not generally known for its conceptual adventurousness. To resort to stereotypes, if representatives of the historical profession were invited to a party, the diplomatic historian would be the stiff, bespectacled man in a suit examining his host’s bookshelves in the corner while the cultural historians smoked weed in the kitchen.

In the beginning was Hitler.

Jan Guillou is a well-known Swedish author, journalist and political commentator.

The rise of the Atlantic world as a framework for understanding early modern and 18th-century Britain has been one of the most significant historiographical developments of the last 25 years.

Mary Laven has established herself as a competent historian, writing on a variety of aspects centred on the Venetian Renaissance. The present book is the first contribution to take her out of Europe, at least in geographical terms.

Jennifer Mori has written a stimulating and engaging study which deserves to find a wide audience. Historians of diplomacy and international relations will learn much from it but it should also be read by those more generally interested in questions of politics and identity in 18th-century Britain.

A detailed biography of George II in English has been needed for some time. His is one of the longer reigns of an early modern British monarch (1727–60), encompassing both the final military defeat of the Stuart cause in 1745, and the high point of the first British Empire.