Harold Wilson's direction of the second British application to join the EEC us ripe for reinterpretation. With new and exciting material now available in the Public Record Office and abroad, this is an extremely propitious moment to reconsider Wilson's motivations, and to contextualise them in light of evidence on foreign policy-making contained in the official record.

Harold Wilson's direction of the second British application to join the EEC is ripe for reinterpretation. During the period of Wilson's first Labour administrations, October 1964-April 1966 and April 1966-June 1970, executive policy-making in Britain became legendary for its supposed opaqueness and intrigue. They are remebered not least for the volume of scandal and in-fighting among a talented but reckless group of ministers, numbering among them a Machiavellian Prime Minister in Wilson, a drunken neurotic in George Brown, and the highly influential and vocal diarists Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman. On top of all this, the 1960s saw a plethora of domestic and foreign-policy crises.

This text offers a refreshing and challenging perspective on the nature of history by analysing the character, role, functioning and wider uses of historiography. Taking British policies towards European integration since World War II as a case study, the author demonstrates how its interpretation and and reportage over time is subject to changing trends. Seeking to explain these trends in terms of the different conceptions of the past which are maintained by different schools of writing, it forces us to confront the fundamental difficulties we encounter in undertaking studies in history. It draws attention to the impact on historical interpretation of changing times, political discourse, the opening of archives, and of subjects being brought to the fore by professional historians. constructing the past and in creating its narratives. Furthermore, it asserts that historiography is riddled with politics at all levels and that to write the historian out of tests is to represent what it entails to write history. In so doing, it demonstrates how the philosophy of history has a direct bearing upon the everyday practice of history. thinking about and understanding history. It should appeal to international historians, those interested in history as a form of philosophical inquiry, to students of European integration history and the Cold War, and to British foreign policy-makers.