Unpublished primary sources
Private papers
Sir Herbert Butterfield (Cambridge University Library)
BUTT/52 | Foreign historians, 1945–1949 |
BUTT/53 | Foreign historians, 1950–1959 |
BUTT/54 | Foreign historians, 1960–1969 |
BUTT/57 | Geyl, Schramm and Ritter, 1951–1967 |
BUTT/130 | Official history, 1945–1954 |
BUTT/531/W | Correspondence with Desmond Williams |
The Hon. Margaret Lambert (private collection, consulted by permission of Sophia Lambert).
Official papers
The National Archives (TNA), London:
FO 370/2906 Library and Research Department General Correspondence: Implications of government proposal that official histories be extended to cover peacetime (1966).
Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), London:
FCO Historians’ collection: Miscellaneous working papers.
Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (AAPD) (Berlin, 1997– ).
Bennett, Gill, and Richard Smith (eds), Britain and the Making of the Post-War World: The Potsdam Conference and Beyond (2020), https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/britain_and_the_making_of_the_post-war_world_with; https://www.amazon.co.uk/Britain-making-Post-War-World-Conference/dp/B08CWCGSNR.
British Documents on the End of Empire (BDEEP) (16 vols, London, 1992–2006), https://bdeep.org/.
British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914 (BD) (11 vols, London, 1926–38).
Cabinet Office, The UK Government’s Official Histories Programme (2008), https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20080205143007/ http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publicationscheme/published_information/1/officialhistory.aspx.
Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette 1871–1914 (GP) (54 vols, Berlin, 1922–7).
Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland (Berne, 1979– ).
Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 (DBFP) (64 vols, London, 1947–86).
Documents on British Policy Overseas (DBPO) (London, Abingdon, 1984–).
Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945 (DGFP), Series C: 1933–1937 (6 vols, London and Washington, DC, 1957–83); Series D: 1937–1941 (13 vols, London and Washington, DC, 1949–64).
Documents on Irish Policy (Dublin, 1997–).
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) (Washington, DC, 1861– ).
House of Lords Hansard, vol. 698, 5 February 2008, cols. 1013–25; vol. 747, 10 July 2013, cols. 335–51; vol. 767, 30 December 2015, cols. 189–200.
House of Lords Library, research briefing: ‘The UK Government’s Official Histories Programme’ (2015), https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/lif-2015-0056/.
Opsahl, Erik (ed.), Arne Ordings dagbøker, bind I, 19. juni 1942–23. juli 1945 (Oslo, 2000).
Pilling, Sir Joe, Review of the Government’s Official History Programme (2009), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/62233/future-plans-government.pdf.
Polish Diplomatic Documents (Warsaw, 2005– ).
Sontag, Raymond J., and James Stuart Beddie (eds), Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941 (Washington, DC, 1948) https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/nazsov.asp.
UK Parliament, Members and Lords: Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank, Written Questions (9 July 2019), https://members.parliament.uk/member/940/writtenquestions#expand-1137959.
Wilson, Harold, Memorandum, ‘The Fifty-Year Rule’, 27 July 1965, printed in Keith Wilson, Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians through Two World Wars (Providence, RI, and Oxford, 1996), pp. 289–93.
Secondary works
Aldrich, Richard J., ‘Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British Intelligence Since 1945’, English Historical Review 119, 483 (Sept. 2004), pp. 922–53.
Annan, Noel, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990).
Beck, Peter J. ‘Locked in a Dusty cupboard, neither accessible on the policy-makers’ desks nor cleared for early publication: Llewellyn Woodward’s official diplomatic history of the Second World War’, English Historical Review, cxxvii (2012), 1435–70.
Behrens, C.B.A., Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War (London, 1955).
Bennett, Gill, Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford, 2013).
Bennett, Gill, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies (Oxford, 2018).
Bentley, Michael, ‘Herbert Butterfield and the ethics of historiography’, History and Theory, xliv (Feb. 2005), 55–71.
Bentley, Michael, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God (Cambridge, 2011).
Bialer, Uri, ‘Telling the truth to the people: Britain’s decision to publish the diplomatic papers of the inter-war period’, Historical Journal, xxvi (Jun.1983), 349–67.
Black, Jeremy, and Karl Schweizer, ‘the value of diplomatic history: A case study in the thought of Herbert Butterfield’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, xvii (2006), 617–31.
Bloch, Michael, Operation Willi: The Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor, July 1940 (London, 1984).
Breuning, Eleanor, ‘International cooperation’, in Papers Presented at the Seminar for Editors of Diplomatic Documents, Held in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 9 November 1989 (Occasional Papers No. 2, London, 1989), pp. 39–43.
Burk, Kathleen, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven and London, 2000).
Butterfield, Herbert, Christianity and History (London, 1949).
Butterfield, Herbert, George III, Lord North and the People, 1779–80 (London, 1949).
Butterfield, Herbert, History and Human Relations (London, 1951).
Butterfield, Herbert, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955).
Butterfield, Herbert, ‘Official history: Its pitfalls and its criteria’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxxviii (June 1949), 129–44.
Butterfield, Herbert, The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800 (London, 1949).
Butterfield, Herbert, The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, 1806–1809 (Cambridge, 1929).
Butterfield, Herbert, ‘Tendencies in historical study in England’, Irish Historical Studies, iv (Mar. 1945), 209–223.
Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931).
Cannon, John, ‘Butterfield, Herbert’, in John Cannon et al. (eds), The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (Oxford, 1988), pp. 61–2.
Cloake, John, ‘The scholar cadet: More recollections of Peterhouse in the 1940s’, Peterhouse Annual Record 2003/2004, pp. 13–25.
Cowling, Maurice, ‘Herbert Butterfield, 1900–1979’, Proceedings of the British Academy, lxv (1979), 595–609.
Cox, Seb,‘Setting the historical agenda: Webster and Frankland and the debate over the strategic bombing offensive against Germany, 1939– 1945’, in The Last Word: Essays on Official History in the United States and the British Commonwealth, ed. Jeffrey Grey (Westport, CT, and London, 2003), pp. 147–73.
Cruickshank, Charles, SOE in the Far East (Oxford, 1983).
Cruickshank, Charles, SOE in Scandinavia (Oxford, 1986).
Dahl, Hans Fredrik, Quisling: A Study in Treachery (Cambridge, 1999).
Davenport-Hines, Richard, and Adam Sisman (eds), One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford, 2014).
Davies, Peter, British Defence Economic Intelligence: A Cold War in Whitehall 1929–90 (2019).
Derry, John, ‘Herbert Butterfield’, in The Historian at Work, ed. John Cannon (London, 1980), pp. 171–87.
Eckert, Astrid M., The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War (New York, 2012).
Elton, G.R., ‘Herbert Butterfield and the study of history’, Historical Journal, xxvii (1984), 729–43.
Eyck, Frank, G.P. Gooch: A Study in History and Politics (London and Basingstoke, 1982).
FCO Historians, History at the Heart of Diplomacy: Historians in the Foreign Office, 1918–2018 (History Note No. 22, London 2018), https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/history_at_the_heart_of_diplomacy-w.
FCO Historians, Nazi Gold: Information from the British Archives (History Note No. 11, London, 1996), https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/history_notes_cover_hphn_11.
FCO Historians, Nazi Gold: Part II: Information from the British Archives (History Note No. 12, London, 1997), https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/history_notes_cover_hphn_12.
FCO Historical Branch, Papers Presented at the Seminar ‘Valid Evidence’, Held in the FCO Library Cornwall House, on 6 November 1987 (Occasional Papers No. 1, London, 1987), https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/hpop_1.
FCO Historical Branch, Papers Presented at the Seminar for Editors of Diplomatic Documents, Held in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 9 November 1989 (Occasional Papers No. 2, London, 1989).
Frankland, Noble, History at War (London, 1998).
Gowing, Margaret, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945 (London, 1964).
Gowing, Margaret, and Lorna Arnold, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–52 (2 vols, London, 1974).
Grant, Matthew, ‘History and policy’, in A Practical Guide to Studying History: Skills and Approaches, ed. Tracey Loughran (London, 2017), pp. 233–47.
Hamilton, Keith, Transformational Diplomacy after the Cold War: Britain’s Know How Fund in Post-Communist Europe, 1989–2003 (London and New York, 2013).
Hancock, W.K., Country and Calling (London, 1954).
Hancock, W.K., and M.M. Gowing, British War Economy (London, 1949).
Harris, Jose, ‘Thucydides amongst the mandarins: Hancock and the World War II civil histories’, in Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian, ed. D.A. Low (Carlton, Victoria, 2001), pp. 122–48.
Hayton, David, Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier (Manchester, 2019).
Heuston, R.F.V., review of War Crimes Trials, vols 4 and 5 (The Hadamar and Natzweiler Trials, London, 1949) and Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, vols 10–13 (London, 1949), International Law Quarterly, iii (Apr. 1950), 307–9.
Jones, Matthew, The Official History of the UK Strategic Nuclear Deterrent (2 vols, London, 2017).
Kent, George O., ‘Editing diplomatic documents: A review of official US and German document series’, American Archivist, lvii (1994), 462–81.
Kent, George O., ‘The German Foreign Ministry’s archives at Whaddon Hall, 1948–58’, American Archivist, xxiv (1961), 43–54.
Keogh, Dermot, Ireland and Europe 1919–1948 (Dublin and Totowa, NJ, 1988).
Lammers, Donald, ‘From Whitehall after Munich: The Foreign Office and the future course of British policy’, Historical Journal, xvi (1973), 831–56.
Lowe, Rodney, ‘Official history’, https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/official_history.html.
McGuire, James, ‘T. Desmond Williams (1921–87)’, Irish Historical Studies, xxvi (May 1988), 3–7.
McIntire, C.T., Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven and London, 2004).
Medlicott, W.N., The Economic Blockade (2 vols, London, 1952–9).
Mehta, Ved, Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (London, 1961).
Moore, Charles, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2, Everything She Wants (London, 2015).
Murphy, Christopher J., ‘The origins of SOE in France’, Historical Journal, xlvi (2003), 935–52.
Namier, L.B., Diplomatic Prelude 1938–1939 (London, 1948).
Namier, L.B., Europe in Decay 1936–1940 (London, 1950).
Noack, Ulrich, biographical details: Universität Greifswald im Nationalsozialismus, https://ns-zeit.uni-greifswald.de/projekt/personen/noack-ulrich/.
Pelly, Margaret, ‘Sensitive documents and editorial freedom’, in FCO Historians, Papers Presented at the Seminar for Editors of Diplomatic Documents, Held in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 9 November 1989 (Occasional Papers No. 2, London, 1989), pp. 44–7.
Postan, Michael M., British War Production (London, 1952).
Riste, Olav, ‘Open season for rewriting history’, The Times, 10 June 1986, p. 12.
Sato, Shohei, ‘“Operation Legacy”: Britain’s destruction and concealment of colonial records worldwide’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xlv, 697–719.
Seldon, Anthony, ‘Why every government department needs a resident historian’, Prospect, 1 May 2020, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/government-department-chief-historian-whitehall-number-10-coronavirus-covid-brexit.
Sharp, Paul, ‘Herbert Butterfield, the English School and the civilizing virtues of diplomacy’, International Affairs, lxxix (Jul. 2003), 855–78.
Simms, Brendan, ‘Butterfield, Sir Herbert (1900–1979)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30888.
Spencer, Frank, ‘The publication of British and German diplomatic documents for the period of the inter-war years’, History, xlvii (1962), 254–86.
Svendsen, Åsmund, Halvdan Koht. Veien mot framtiden. En biografi (Oslo, 2013).
Sweet, Paul R., ‘Der Versuch amtlicher Einflussnahme auf die Edition der “Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1933–1941”. Ein Fall aus den fünfziger Jahren’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, xxxix (Apr. 1991), 265–303.
Sweet, Paul R., ‘The Windsor File’, The Historian, lix (1997), 263–79.
Taylor, A.J.P., English History 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965; revised paperback edition, Harmondsworth, 1970).
Taylor, A.J.P., A Personal History (London, 1984; paperback edition, 1984).
Taylor, A.J.P., Review of Charles Tansill, Back Door to War: Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy 1933–1941, Manchester Guardian, 24 October 1952, reprinted as ‘Roosevelt and the War’, in Struggles for Supremacy, ed. Wrigley, pp. 245–7.
Taylor, A.J.P., The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961).
Taylor, A.J.P., The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954).
Wall, Stephen, The Official History of Britain and the European Community, vol. 3 (2018).
Watt, D. Cameron, ‘British historians, the war guilt issue, and post-war Germanophobia: A documentary note’, Historical Journal, xxxvi (1993), 179–85.
Weinberg, Gerhard L., ‘Critical note on the Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945’, Journal of Modern History, xxiii (1951), 38–40.
Welch, Colin, Daily Telegraph obituary of 1 February 1997, reprinted in Peterhouse Annual Record 2011/2012 (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 116–19.
Wheeler-Bennett, Sir John, Friends, Enemies and Sovereigns (London, 1976).
Williams, T. Desmond, ‘The historiography of World War II’, in Historical Studies I, ed. T. Desmond Williams (London, 1958), pp. 33–49; reprinted in. The Origins of the Second World War: Historical Interpretations, ed. Esmonde M. Robertson (London and Basingstoke, 1971), pp. 36–64.
Williams, T. Desmond, ‘Some aspects of contemporary history’, Cambridge Journal, ii (Sept. 1949), 733–42.
Wilson, Keith, ‘Introduction: Governments, historians, and “historical engineering”’, in Forging the Collective Memory: Governments and International Relations Through Two World Wars, ed. Keith Wilson (Providence, RI, and London, 1996), pp. 1–27.
Wilson, S.S., The Cabinet Office to 1945 (Public Records Handbook No. 17, London, 1975).
Woodward, E.L., ‘Some considerations on the present state of historical studies’, Proceedings of the British Academy 1950, 95–112.
Woodward, E.L., The Study of International Relations at a University: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 17 February 1945 (Oxford, 1945).
Woodward, Sir Llewellyn, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (5 vols, London, 1970–6).
Wrigley, Chris (ed.), Struggles for Supremacy: Diplomatic Essays by A.J.P. Taylor (Aldershot, 2000).
Zala, Sacha, Geschichte unter der Schere politischer Zensur. Amtliche Aktensammlungen im internationalen Vergleich (Munich, 2001).