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Film is increasingly engaging the attention of students of history at all levels. In its manifold forms from the newsreel to the 'feature', it is a major source of evidence for, and an important influence upon, contemporary history, and a vivid means of bringing the recent past to life. For earlier periods, it provides a medium in which the often widely dispersed visual evidences of the past can be brought together for the student. It offers the historian a new form in which to interpret and present his subject, and, as television has shown, it is by far the most important vehicle for the presentation of history to mass audiences. The analysis of its content and impact and the exploration of its uses are especially fitted to bring history into an interdisciplinary relationship with other fields, from sociology to the visual arts.

'There was', Gladstone declared in 1895, 'no life which required so much to be written as that of Disraeli.' Benjamin Disraeli was born in London in 1804, the grandson of an Italian Jew. In this fresh account of his life, Paul Smith looks at Disraeli's unique character as a fuse of Jewishness and Anglicanism, outsider and insider, nationalist and European, Romantic and Tory; and shows how this formed his 'appeal as an original and a card, the most piquant joker in the pack. His indomitable nerve, as a faintly raffish outsider, in scaling the highest peaks of public life, added spice … to an increasingly unpopular government.'

Leader of the Conservative party for seventeen years and prime minister for fourteen, the third Marquis of Salisbury was one of the most successful political practitioners of modern times, as well as a major international statesman. Yet he was also a prolific and pungent writer on politics. The large body of journalism which he produced during the first thirty years of his career enables us to examine in detail the views on politics and society which underlay his practical action. While his brand of Conservatism was conventional in its conclusions, it was distinguished by the highly sceptical and utilitarian mode of reasoning through which it sought to reach them, and by its insistence on a crudely conceived class struggle as the driving force of history and politics. Its central theme was hostility to 'democracy'; and when, after 1867, 'democracy' seemed to have arrived, it questioned how far the system of parliamentary government could work tolerably under the new dispensation.

The introduction and four scholarly essays in this volume constitute an overview of Hemingway's career as a short story writer and offer an overview of practical problems involved in reading this work. The early short story Up in Michigan is explained in relation to the short story cycle In Our Time. Problems of narration are analysed in Now I Lay Me, an integral part of the famous Nick Adams stories. A detailed look at ecological and Native American backgrounds is presented in Fathers and Sons, in the collection Winner Take Nothing; and Snows of Kilimanjaro is examined from a postcolonial perspective. Also included is a selected bibliography designed to direct readers to the most valuable resources for the study of Hemingway's short fiction.

This concise study of Disraeli, aimed at the general reader as much as at the student, stands in contrast to the many full-length studies which continue to appear. It focuses on the substantial reassessment of Disraeli's career and personality which is currently taking place. Particular reference is made to the role played in Disraeli's conception of life and politics by his Jewishness and his romanticism. The book also seeks to understand Disraeli in a European as well as a British frame of thought.