Anthony Adamthwaite

‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation'∗: The BBC's response to peace and defence issues, 1945–58 1

Why did the first nuclear disarmament movement fail to change official policies? Much of the response to this question has focused on the movements internal divisions and conflicts. Surprisingly, little has been written about the role of external influences such as the media. This article draws on BBC archives to demonstrate that the corporation censored not only peace campaigners but also discussion of nuclear war and its effects. The BBC despite its vaunted independence and impartiality acted as the Establishments voice, promoting the official line on defence, muzzling or restricting the expression of conflicting views. From 1945 to 1954 the issues posed by nuclear arms were generally avoided; after 1954 the BBC responded to public concern by discouraging controversy. It also participated in an official counter‐campaign against critics of nuclear war. Consequently, a full analysis of the failure of the peace movements of the 1950s must take into account the strength of the states sophisticated inform...

Georges Clemenceau France

to create a comprehensive list of Jewish names, something that was hampered by cultural differences: many Jewish surnames had a number of variant spellings, leading to cousins (and even siblings) being recorded as different families, the widespread employment of nicknames and diminutives caused school and birth records not to tally with everyday usage. The attempt to separate ‘Jewish’ names from ‘Christian’ names, and to prevent Jews from using the latter, failed. This effort to draw firm lines between religious identities foundered on the inevitable overlap between the two faiths. Avrutin’s conclusions are important for our understanding of the Jewish experience in late Imperial Russia and for our appreciation of how that country was governed. The efforts of successive emperors to govern Russian society through bureaucracy were thwarted by the inability of the bureaucracy to deal with Jews. This cut both ways. If many Jews managed to evade the bureaucracy and to manipulate it in their hope of improving their lot, other Jews found, when trying to comply with state regulations, that the very inability of the bureaucracy to deal efficiently with their ethnic group was itself a barrier to their participation in society. The result was unsatisfactory both for the state and for the Jews. This is a useful book. It enhances our knowledge of the Jewish experience in Russia and at the same time increases our understanding of the functioning of the Tsarist state generally. In addition to its strong archival base, the book has an excellent multilingual bibliography. The author has thought hard about his topic and his conclusions are judicious and never overreach his research.

Britain and the Defeated French, From Occupation to Liberation, 1940–1944, by Peter Mangold

attribute guilt accept the orthodox school’s proposition that, without the mistakes, negligence, and immorality of policy-makers, war would have been averted. Whatever the drawbacks of appeasement, the process of exhausting peaceful alternatives, as Ritchie Ovendale argued, at least ensured that the Commonwealth went to war united. Granted Australia’s inability to exert decisive influence in Whitehall, it is difficult to blame its leaders for the supposed failures of appeasement. Quite simply, British foreign policy would not have been transformed even if Australian governments had been ardent ‘anti-appeasers’. It is, therefore, doubtful whether the ‘imperial appeasement policy’, that Waters identifies, ever existed.