This book is a collection of the diary letters of Austen Chamberlain from 1916 to 1937. These letters provide a valuable insight into the political life of one of the leading Conservative politicians of the inter-war period, and constitute a detailed record of Conservative and national politics at this time. They provide particularly valuable personal accounts of key events such as the negotiations of the Irish Treaty in 1921, the troubles leading to the Carlton Club revolt of October 1922, the Locarno agreements of 1925, the leadership crisis of 1930-31, and the backbench campaign against...

Appeasement alternatives to World War II have been the subject of intense debate and this volume addresses the vital phenomenon of elite and intellectual opinion. Representing a wide-ranging selection of individuals with considerable wealth and public service, the unique All Souls 'think-tank' deliberated for almost two years to develop an alternative foreign policy for a country facing the menacing threat of World War II. This volume analyzes the think-tank's struggles to establish a consensus for a foreign policy document to guide public debate in the avoidance of another world war.

The political journal of John Wodehouse, first Earl of Kimberley (1862-1902) is one of the finest political diaries of the last half of the nineteenth century. Born into an old Tory family, Kimberley followed his forebears in attending Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, but shocked his neighbors by adopting Liberal principles. Uniquely placed as an observer, Kimberley was the only Liberal to serve in every Cabinet of the Gladstone/Rosebery era. The Kimberley Journal is replete with humorous anecdotes, information regarding policy development, and acute observations about politicians and...

This volume publishes the private diary of a senior Conservative Member of Parliament, Sir Cuthbert Headlam, during the period of the Second World War. Clearly written and highly readable, it gives a fascinating inside view of British public life in those years. Because of its length and coverage, this political diary is uniquely important. It covers the period of 'appeasement' and the coming of the war, the conflict itself, and post-war Labour government and the development of the Cold War. It has much to say about figures such as Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.

Elizabeth Freke's accounts of her late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Norfolk gentry world are the basis for a new critical edition of her autobiography. A complexly contradictory woman caught in an unhappy domestic life, she consciously constructed and reconstructed an identity as a wife, mother, and widow. By preserving two quite often different manuscript versions, the edition provides a new appreciation of a distinct self-image among early modern women's autobiography.

The Plumpton Letters and Papers provides a day-by-day record of Sir William Plumpton's struggle to maintain his local influence and, by devious means, pass his entire inheritance to a younger son, the future Sir Robert, who may have been illegitimate. The letters detail the protracted legal proceedings through which his granddaughter obtained these rights while Sir Robert was reduced to near penury, until a final arbitration at length reinstated him in his ancestral manor of Plumpton. Intermingled are fascinating glimpses of medieval life.

This book is an edited and annotated version of the journals kept by A. L. Kennedy of The Times who was responsible for writing most of the editorials on European affairs between 1932 and 1939. They provide details of his meetings with Mussolini, Hitler and others, explain the relationship between The Times, the British Government and the Foreign Office, and provide an illuminating insight into the support for "appeasement" and the origins of the Second World War.

This volume publishes official reports written for the Foreign Office by British envoys to the German States in the nineteenth century. It covers the period from the Vienna Congress in 1815 to the dissolution of the German Confederation. All despatches are transcribed and annotated for the first time. The following missions are included: Frankfurt (Diet of the German Confederation), Berlin (Prussia), Munich (Bavaria), Stuttgart (WUrttemberg), Dresden (Saxony), Vienna (Austria) and Hanover from 1837. The selection presents attitudes to the political, economic, military, cultural, and social...

Common law rules made litigation between husband and wife impossible in the 16/17th century, except in ecclesiastical courts. In practice, however, a few wives and husbands sued their spouses in courts of equity. This volume reproduces twenty such suits from the Court of Requests 'the poor man's Chancery' during the final century of its operation. These extraordinary cases involving separated couples provide a fascinating and often surprising view of the limits of married people's rights and options at a time when divorce in the modern sense was unavailable. The court's decrees and orders...

A collection of seventeenth-century documents on parliamentary and financial matters.