Review article: Movers and Shakers: the Barbarians and the Fall of Rome

Books received for review:
The Lombards . By Neil Christie.
The Goths . By Peter Heather.
The End of Roman Britain . By Michael E. Jones.
The Huns . By Edward A. Thompson (revised by P. Heather).     

Euratom and the IAEA: the problem of self-inspection

The IAEA was saddled with one burden at its inception, a burden that dogged it for many years afterwards. It was that Euratom, which had formally come into being in 1958, was authorised to implement its own safeguards, i.e. it was accorded the right of ‘self-inspection’. The first US director of the IAEA, Sterling Cole, fought a bitter battle to have this overturned, insisting that it undermined the core mission of the Agency and that it set an impossible precedent, and would trigger demands for a ‘Latinatom’ etc. This paper describes the circumstances that led the State Department to grant Euratom this privilege (a policy choice that is indicative of the deep investment that both J.F. Dulles and Eisenhower made in supranationality) and discusses the steps that Cole took to overturn it, to no avail.     

Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War/Tito: A Biography

The 1956 Suez Crisis has attracted enormous attention and been widely seen as marking a sea change in Britain's position in the Middle East and within the Anglo-American special relationship. Yet in September 1951 the Attlee government had already signalled waning British power in pulling back from major unilateral military action to defend Britain's single most important overseas asset: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its huge operations in Iran. What this crisis revealed of British aspirations in the Middle East and within the special relationship has not received the attention it deserves. This article examines the Attlee government's decision to ‘scuttle’ from Abadan in September 1951. It first places the decision in the context of Anglo-American relations and great cumulative pressure in favour of British military action. It then weighs various considerations claimed in the extant literature to explain the British decision. In doing so it disagrees with suggestions that British military intervention was precluded by an understanding between Truman and Attlee that such action was acceptable only in a narrow range of circumstances for fear of retaliatory Soviet intervention in Iran. It also argues that accounts that correctly emphasise US opposition to the use of force as the key restraint on the Attlee government could and should have gone further. Specifically, it needs to be better appreciated just how the Truman administration actively undermined potential British recourse to military intervention, infused other potential constraints with extra weight and helped delay a Cabinet decision until a point when armed intervention was least likely to achieve British ends.     

Picturing the poor: fundraising and the depoliticisation of homelessness

In this paper, we discuss the role images play in attracting charitable donations in an English homeless shelter. Focusing in particular on two image-based projects which feature service-users (one series of black-and-white still photography and one series of film clips posted on YouTube), we draw on interviews with fundraisers and the homeless participants themselves to discuss how they motivated their involvement and what impact they hoped the images would achieve. We conclude by providing some snapshots of how earlier images produced in the shelter have been circulated.