The writing of twentieth-century history is still something heavily defined by national categories. It may be said that much of this is natural and appropriate – and even unavoidable. But given that so much of human experience involves the crossing of borders of many kinds it may be proposed that too rigid a distinction between domestic and foreign affairs must deprive scholars of many opportunities and readers of many dimensions of historical reality. In the twentieth century the politics of one country very often became the concern of the citizens in another. That this should be so was almost an axiom of that liberal moral consciousness which extended the boundaries of conventional politics in the age of mass democracy. One historian of religion whose work demonstrated this most often was Owen Chadwick. When he was invited to give the Ford Lectures in English History at the University of Oxford he chose to examine the role of one Englishman whose work was done not in Britain but Italy. This was the remarkable D’Arcy Osborne, the British representative to the Holy See during the Second World War. Chadwick later recalled how ‘one eminent historian’ doubted that this could be a subject of English history at all. Would the creator of the lectureship have approved? ‘But the history of England’, responded Chadwick mildly, but firmly, ‘also happens elsewhere than in England.’1