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Groups of racist skinheads now constitute a significant element of the global radical right. The British youth subculture of the late 1960s has thus been transformed into a worldwide social movement, the violent cutting-edge of white supremacist resistance to multiculturalism. Pollard examines the historical development of the racist skinhead phenomenon and, in particular, analyses the origins, nature and development of the ideas that inspire it: the foundational myth; ‘skinhead, a way of life’; Odinism or paganism; the skinhead as victim; skinheads as a vanguard of white, male, working-class revolutionaries; National Socialism and antisemitism; and, above all, racialism.

The essays brought together here were originally delivered as presentations at the ‘Fascist Ideologues: Past and Present’ conference, held at Teesside University in July 2013. The collection addres...

During his pontificate, Pius xi (1922–39) vigorously promoted the ‘export’ of the Italian model of Catholic Action to the rest of the Church as the organisational blueprint for Catholic lay activism, particularly in the battle against atheistic Communism. He was assisted by Mgr, later Cardinal, Giuseppe Pizzardo, the head of Italian Catholic Action. The successes and failures of this campaign are tracked through documents available since the opening of the files of the apostolic nunciatures and delegations and the Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs section of the Secretariat of State for Pius xi's pontificate in the Vatican Archives.

This article analyses the parallels between the role played by the Church, first during the Crisis of the Liberal State in the early twentieth century and then during the transition from the Christian Democratic regime to the ‘bi-polar’ Second Republic more than 70 years later. It explores both the particular, contingent forces at work in each, and the underlying explanations as to why the Church was able to successfully exploit these two processes of transition in the political history of Italy to its advantage. It concludes by arguing that the experience of these two crises demonstrates that the Church is not only a powerful force in Italian civil society but also effectively ‘a state within a state’ in relation to the functioning of Italy's political structures.

(2007). A Court in Exile: The Vatican, 1870–1929. The Court Historian: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 35-47.

Ever since Leo XIII promulgated his encyclical Rerum novarum, ‘On the Conditions of the Working Classes’, in 1891, successive popes have added to the corpus of Catholic teaching on social/ labour questions. Pius X, for example, published an encyclical specifically addressing the vexed question of ‘interconfessional’ Christian trade unions in Germany, and Pius XI published no fewer than three encyclicals on social questions in the space of twelve months – Quadragesimo anno of May 1931, Nova impendet of October 1931, and Cantate Christi compulsi of May 1932. Recent popes, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, have been equally prolific in their commentaries on the labour question.

The signing of the Lateran Pacts between Mussolini and Pius XI not only changed the status of the Vatican, it also transformed its financial position overnight. After decades of financial difficulty, the Vatican acquired a substantial capital endowment, the investment of which the pope entrusted to Bernardino Nogara. But as the diary of Nogara reveals, as a result of the pope's ambitious spending plans, the lack of a proper system of financial control in the Vatican, and, above all, the impact of the Wall Street crash, within less than two years the Vatican was losing money hand over fist. This article explains how Nogara reconstructed the finances of the Vatican in the wake of this disaster, and explores the links between the Vatican's first experience of playing the international capital markets and the pope's notions of social and economic ethics.

DURING the Corinthian War' Agesilaos, after capturing the port of Lechaion in 391 B.C., returned to Corinth the following spring. He found the Corinthians and Argives, who had formed a defensive union, on the point of celebrating the Isthmian Games. When the Spartans approached, the celebrants decamped, whereupon Agesilaos bivouacked in the sacred enclosure, sacrificed to Poseidon on his own account, and waited until the pro-Spartan Corinthian exiles had done the same. On the king's departure the Corinthians and Argives returned and celebrated the games all over again. Agesilaos, meantime, decided to attack Peiraion (modern Perachora), the peninsula opposite Corinth, as the exiles had reported that the Corinthians pastured their flocks and presumably obtained supplies there. Finding it strongly held by Iphicrates and his peltasts, he made a feint in the direction of the city itself. When Iphicrates was ordered back by the Corinthians to cover the capital, Agesilaos resumed his attack on the peninsula. He camped at Therma (modern Lutraki) and dispatched a contingent to command the heights overlooking Peiraion in order to cow the inhabitants. In this he was successful for they withdrew to the Heraion, at the end of the peninsula, where the king ultimately followed them.

One of the most arresting natural features at Delphi is the great rock pulpit which projects between the ruins of the Bouleuterion and the terrace walls supporting Apollo's temple (Plate 51b). It is rent on its southern side by a large fissure up which was hewn a flight of still discernible steps. The area in which it stands is of more than ordinary interest, as being identifiable with τὸ τᾶς Γᾶς ἱερρόν mentioned in a Delphic inscription dating from the fourth century B.C. On the rock itself the Sibyl, variously identified, was said to have sat (or stood) and prophesied. Yet most modern Delphic historians, while devoting much space to the Pythia, and to the obscure details of the oracle's mechanism, either have tended to ignore the Sibyl altogether, or have dismissed her from serious consideration with a few brief words as an unimportant late-comer. Some indeed have come near to identifying her with the Pythia. One actually did.