ABSTRACT
When I became a research student in 1979, the future looked bleak. Mike Dockrill, my supervisor, who taught me how to write, accepted me only after warning there were no jobs. He was right. Fortunately, matters improved in the fields in which I work, and not just in terms of employment. After continuing to decline toward death watch, diplomatic history has recently shown signs of life. International and strategic history have grown slowly but steadily, the study of intelligence has boomed, and military history has entered a golden age. There are more military historians today than ever before, and more good ones. New areas of the field, such as airpower history, have been born and dead ones, such as naval history, reborn. All these fields, along with international relations and strategic studies, share a focus on power, strategy, armed forces and war, on ideas about these matters and the human experience with them. They are different parts of one whole-so, at least, it seems to me.
