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Ottoman histories – better put: histories of the Ottoman state – have some right to be regarded in a pseudo-Braudelian sense as une historiographie du longue durée.

In the 1990s medieval historians were very preoccupied with border studies. No sooner had the dust settled on the collapse of the Berlin Wall than medievalists were taking advantage of no frills air travel to jet off and discuss borders, frontiers and marches.

The reader coming to this volume expecting a major new biography of Henry VIII’s second and most interesting queen is likely to be disappointed.

Scandals are titillating phenomena, intriguing and enjoyable for almost everyone except their victims. They often carry two highly attractive features: first sex, and second the opportunity of watching high and mighty people being revealed to have feet of clay and thus brought low.

For medievalists, the long-awaited appearance of Gerald Harriss’s volume in the New Oxford History of England constitutes a major publishing event. In this superb study a leading academic historian, K. B. McFarlane’s successor at Magdalen, offers an authoritative summing-up of a period which saw medieval England transformed.

Both these books have their origins in excellent PhD research theses, which have then been adapted into book form. Both books are highly original, well-written and well-organised.

In 1990 Robert Gellately completed a major study which investigated the role of the secret police in Nazi Germany. His book, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1995) demonstrated conclusively that the much feared and allegedly omnipresent Gestapo in fact relied on widespread public support to function effectively.

The literature on the role of the French as ‘other’ in the formation of a British national identity in the eighteenth century is probably not as rich as many readers might think.(1) Indeed, the literature on French Anglophobia seems a little more sustained.(2) Semmel’s work, which looks at the impact of Napoleon on British politi

The First World War is Russia’s ‘forgotten war’. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the memory of the war was subsumed into the history of the revolutionary process.

In July 2004 Tony Blair attacked the 'liberal consensus' of the 1960s, claiming that it had helped to undermine respect for law and order in Britain. It was hardly the first time that Blair had borrowed an argument from the right wing of the Conservative Party, but this speech set new standards of audacity.