The Official History of Britain and the Community, Volume. II: From Rejection to Referendum, 1963-1975. by Stephen Wall. Whitehall Histories: Government Official History Series. New York, Routledge, 2013. xii, 668 pp. $100.00 US (cloth). With a plurality of Britons registering Eurosceptic attitudes in numerous opinion polls and a promised referendum raising the prospect of a British withdrawal from the Union, it might be difficult to imagine that there was a time when British politicians and the voting public they represented eagerly, even insistently, sought to participate in integration efforts. Yet with the spectacular economic growth experienced by the member states of the Economic Community (EEC) in the 1960s, Britain's desire to join was strong enough to withstand two rejections before her application was accepted in 1971, while the referendum held two years after joining registered a 2-1 majority in favour of remaining. In this book, the second volume of the official history of Britain's relationship with Europe after the Second World War, Stephen Wall focuses on this period, showing how successive Conservative and Labour governments courted leaders and guided British policy during its first two tumultuous years as a new member. Wall begins by recounting the failure of Britain's first effort to join in 1963. Though much of this is ground already covered by Alan Milward in his previous volume in the series, The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy (London, 2005), Wall draws more heavily upon the official records to provide a much more detailed description of the various meetings and the positions taken. The picture that emerges is sympathetic to the circumstances faced by Harold Macmillan's government, with public opinion and Labour opposition constraining their ability to meet Charles de Gaulle's conditions for French approval. Nevertheless, with de Gaulle's veto [t]he central plank of [Harold Macmillan's] foreign and domestic policy had been pulled brutally from under him, (p. 41) leaving Macmillan and his successor as prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, few options other than to wait on events in the hope for a more favourable opportunity. The Labour Party's victory in the 1964 general election relieved Conservatives of their woes and brought Harold Wilson to the premiership. More than Macmillan or Edward Heath, Wall regards Wilson as the underappreciated hero of Britain's efforts to join the EEC, arguing that while Heath was a European of head and heart, it was Wilson whose management of the issue, both as prime minister and later as leader of the opposition, kept a workable policy of Europe alive within the Labour Party (p. 2). Perhaps nowhere is this better demonstrated than in his successful maneuvering of a divided cabinet towards a second application in 1967, yet Wilson's effort to bluff de Gaulle by threatening a closer relationship with the United States if vetoed a second time had the opposite of its intended effect, hardening the French president's objections by reinforcing his biases. Yet the position of the two nations' leaders was the reverse of 1963; rejection came in the aftermath of Wilson's success in the 1966 general election, while the major opponent of Britain's application was clearly in his waning years as president. …