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The articulation of a national network of elementary schools in England and Wales after 1870 and legislation to compel attendance at these schools from 1880 created marvellous opportunities for publishers. School authorities were major purchasers and the children in their schools a captive audience.

The enormously energetic working-class reading cultures occupying the core of Jonathan Rose’s magnificent study grew up from rather unpromising roots. For long periods, reading, like publishing, could be a dangerous business.

This book would have been a valuable addition to the historical literature on the English Reformation at any time, but its publication now is particularly timely, as the Reformation debate begins to focus on early English Protestantism with a set of questions previously unasked.

Clarkson's and Crawford's research at the Centre for Social Research and in this book builds on Kenneth H. Connell's pioneering studies of population and of Irish diet.

This volume is the second published in the Yale University Press series, The New Economic History of Britain. The New Economic History will eventually provide a continuum of scholarly surveys of the British economy from early times to the present, but in a more accessible form: that is, without the usual impedimenta of footnotes or endnotes and with an eye to a less specialist reading market.

At least until recently, the explosion in study of the history of mental illness has not been mirrored in comparable studies of the history of developmental disability. In the last few years, that has begun to change, with the publications of major works by Mathew Thomson,(1) David Wright,(2) and this work by Mark Jackson.

In October 2001 the IHR organised a one-day conference, 'Historians on Sport', inviting the editor of the New DNB to give the keynote address. Brian Harrison happily confessed to a poverty of sporting knowledge, but readily conceded the centrality of sport to our understanding of the changing nature of British society over the past two hundred years or more.

In spite of its intellectual, literary and comic brilliance, this book contains a dark and disturbing, but revealing, message. In some ways, my melancholy reading of Bodies Politic has inevitably been shaped by Roy's recent untimely death. Roy Porter was without doubt the finest social historian of medicine this country, or indeed the world, has produced.

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992) provided a broad, compelling account of popular religion in England before and during the Reformation, and was a book which undoubtedly changed the way we think about late medieval Catholicism and the popular experience of religious change.

The relationship between slavery, colonialism, capital accumulation and economic development has long been an issue that has exercised political economists and economic historians, though it is perhaps fair to say that it tends to be neglected in standard university courses for undergraduates.