Scholars have long described the reasons for Anne Boleyn's execution and the nature of her guilt. Recent analyses have suggested that Henry VIII lost interest in his second wife after she miscarried of a male child in 1536 and that his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, wanted to exclude her family from positions of power at court. With royal approval, so it is claimed, Cromwell caused the queen and five men to be executed for the fictitious crimes of adultery and incest. Although some scholars have conceded that she was careless of her honour, most have assumed that Anne was not guilty of these charges. Historians have consequently adopted the cynical conclusion that Cromwell succeeded in orchestrating a wide-ranging conspiracy involving numerous people with the intention of using the legal system to kill six innocent victims in order to satisfy both his own schemes for power and the king's domestic whims.

As Oliver Cromwell set out on his controversial reconquest of Ireland in 1649, it was widely believed in England that the Levellers were opposed to all English rule in Ireland, and that these pro-Irish views were responsible for the mutinies and disorders in the commonwealth's armies which delayed the setting out of Cromwell's expedition.

Ours is the age of the Jacobite restoration – not in dynastic terms, but in historical scholarship. Parliamentary Jacobitism in the period after 1710 has particularly attracted recent attention. While disagreement persists among historians as to the extent and seriousness of tory involvement with the Jacobite cause, few would deny that the issue is significant. By contrast, the influence of Jacobitism on politics under William III has been almost entirely neglected. Beyond the shadowy conspiracies that have long fascinated researchers, little is known of the role of Jacobite sentiment in the political life of England between 1688 and 1702. Not much has been added to Keith Feiling's sixty-year old assessment of the Jacobites as ‘that right wing of Toryism, in which the whole pre-Revolutionary sentiment survived’.

Blackstone's Commentaries have traditionally evoked two responses. On the one hand, from Bentham on, the work has been seen as confused and contradictory, based on theoretical foundations which were either irrelevant to his task, or ignored in practice in the book. On the other hand, although his achievement and in particular his theorising have been criticised, the Commentaries have also been seen as the first attempt to systematise English law and to ground it on solid principles, thereby creating a new ‘science of English law’. Both Lord Mansfield and Bentham himself praised Blackstone on this score, while Sir William Jones enthused that ‘his Commentaries are the most correct and beautiful outline that was ever exhibited of any human science’ Modern writers have agreed that Blackstone made a significant contribution to the development of law as a science.

When Adam Smith set out to re-shape the dominant economic policies and assumptions of his time, he knew success in pressing for ‘free trade’ would depend on his ability to imprint his views on the minds of contemporary statesmen and legislators. But he was never confident that this operation might take place during his lifetime. In the Wealth of Nations, he declared that to expect freedom of trade to be accepted entirely in Great Britain was ‘as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it’, and this was by no means an offhand remark. Much of the massive book was coloured by Smith's awareness that liberal economic doctrines, whatever their considerable intellectual merits, ran far ahead of actual political and social attitudes in eighteenth-century Europe. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a variety of political and economic developments of course refuted Smith's view that ‘free trade’ was an unattainable ideal. But the historical verification of his economic thinking was a slow, difficult, and limited process.

When Napoleon returned from exile on the island of Elba, he immediately set about gathering the support that he hoped would re-establish him as ruler of France. No sooner had he disembarked at Antibes on 1 March 1815 than he began issuing proclamations in which he portrayed himself as the leading soldier of the Republic and a man of the Revolution. His appeals found a welcome response in the French populace that astonished his opponents and perhaps surprised the emperor as well. Napoleon had changed the very nature of Bonapartism by allying himself with the tradition of the Revolution, and the federation movement which swept across France during the six weeks prior to Waterloo was a direct response to his new appeal.

‘So Arthur Balfour is really leader – and Tory Democracy, the genuine article, at an end!’ Conventional historical wisdom has endorsed Randolph Churchill's judgement of 1891, attributing the demise of tory democracy partly to Balfour himself and partly to the inexorable forces of class division. Balfour's tactical ingenuity secured the defeat of Joseph Chamberlain's tariff reform, a valiant bid to revive tory democracy and turn back the tide of class politics; thereafter the Liberals, anxious to retain their working-class support, made the running on social reform, while the Unionists fell back on ‘negative’ policies and the middle-class vote. Yet perhaps historians have become the prisoners of their own orthodoxy. Though the ideology, the policies and the electoral bases of the new Liberalism have been extensively explored, the Unionists have been relatively neglected. Because it is assumed that before 1914 the Conservative party was devoid of proposals for social reform, one of the most obvious sources for such proposals has been overlooked: the Unionist Social Reform Committee of 1911 to 1914.

When thinking of Churchill's attitude towards the Soviet Union one automatically thinks of him as the most outspoken of the advocates of armed intervention during the civil war, or as the author of the speech in Fulton, Missouri, which many people regard as the opening salvo in the Cold War. During the war, however, when the Soviet Union became a great ally without whose help the war in Europe could never have been won, his attitude was bound to be quite different. Even before the Germans launched ‘Operation Barbarossa’ thus forcing the Soviets into the Allied camp, Churchill had been thinking of the Russians as possible partners in the struggle against Nazi Germany, for however much he detested the Soviet regime, his passionate determination to destroy Nazism was a far more powerful emotion, and, as he put it, if Hitler were to invade Hell he would promptly sign a pact with the Devil.