Welsh Journals

In short, while the book will provide a very useful and up-to-date survey, it does not attempt a full-scale critical examination of the thesis of crisis. This might involve considering how Dangerfield and Halevy got the idea of an Edwardian crisis in the first place and an assessment as to how far their work has been superseded by research based on material not available to them. Oral history, for example, has had the effect of reducing the percep- tion of crisis to much more modest proportions, while the study of the Radical Right has complemented that approach by focusing attention on a different part of the political elite to that which attracted the interest of Dangerfield in 1935. MARTIN PUGH Newcastle-upon-Tyne CAPITAL Cities AT WAR. LONDON, Paris, BERUN 1914-1918. Edited by J. M. Winter and Jean-Louis Robert. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp.622. £ 60.00. The blurb at the front of this book makes large claims. It marks, we are told, 'a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War'. The editors have gathered a group of scholars of Paris, London and Berlin and we are promised an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the war which 'will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars'. If that is the case, it seems unfortunate that the editors do not provide us with more information on the contrib- utors, about whom we have no biographical details, either in their own chapters or at the end of the book. Another irritating feature is the lack of an introduction explaining that this is only the first of two volumes, the second of which, it is promised, will deal with 'wartime reactions and perceptions of families, social groups and social movements'. Apart from tantaliz-ing references to Volume II in some of the chapters, it is not until the editors' conclusion that this is explained, and even then this reviewer was left rather unclear about what exactly was to be revealed in the second instal- ment. In fact, what we are given is a worthy, if inevitably uneven, collection of essays in which the authors relate their research interests in social or economic history to the problems facing the three capital cities during the Great War. One of the problems many of them face is that in various areas of social or economic policy it is actually rather difficult to describe the issues under discussion from the point of view of an ill-defined and often