1. P. A. Hanner, “The Irish Question and Liberal Politics, 1886–1894,” Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 511–32
2. Deryck Schreuder, “Gladstone as ‘Troublemaker’: Liberal Foreign Policy and the German Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine,” Journal of British Studies, 18 (Spring 1978), 106–35.
3. For a judicious recent appraisal of the relation between Gladstone’s moral principles in politics and his personality, see Barbara C. Malament, “W. E. Gladstone: Another Victorian?” British Studies Monitor, 8 (Winter 1978), 22–38.
4. Gladstone to W. S. Blunt, January 20, 1882, Add. Mss. 44545; W. E. Gladstone, “Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East,” Nineteenth Century, 2 (August-December 1877), 149–66.
5. The old thesis is that of A. J. P. Taylor, Germany’s First Bid for Colonies, 1884–1885 (London, 1938). The most important work demolishing it is Henry Ashby Turner, “Bismarck’s Imperial Venture: Anti-British in Origin?” in Prosser Gilford and William R. Louis, eds., Britain and Germany in Africa (New Haven, 1967), 47-82, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne and Berlin, 1969). See also G. N. Sanderson, “The European Partition of Africa: Coincidence or Conjuncture?” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 3 (October 1974), 1–54