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For at least the first half of the twentieth century, Scottish history could be said to have stopped in 1707. The history of the Scottish nation was the history of Bruce, Wallace and the Douglases; of knights in armour, cross-border warfare and corrupt priests.

Edwin Jones has produced a powerful, complex, eloquent and truly remarkable book. It is a heady blend of history and politics, past and present - committed scholarship in the best sense. It rests on the conviction that historical understanding matters.

The history of public health has been a flourishing field in the last three decades. Yet despite a spate of excellent monographs about various epidemic diseases and many good collections about health and disease in Africa, Asia, The Middle East, Latin America, as well as Europe and North America, the most recent textbook on the history of public health is four decades old.

In the last twenty years or so there have been great transformations in the historiography of modern South Asia. It would not be too crude an exaggeration to say that no western historian of much intellectual ambition engaged with the subject from James Mill in the early nineteenth century until after the second world war, while Indian historians were little known outside the subcontinent.

There are two qualities in Dr. Gildea’s book that are immediately apparent. The first is the sensible planning of the contents. Beginning with "The Crisis of Empire", the last chapter is "France in search of a world role". The second chapter is "Crisis in the state", balanced by the penultimate chapter, "The Republic of the Centre".

Bronislaw Geremek needs no introduction to the international community of historians. In 1995, at the last congress of the International Association of Historians, in Montreal the first plenary session was opened by an hour long video recorded with him, how he sees history being both its expert analyst and also a prominent actor in the past decades.

Not long ago Cormac Ó Gráda lamented the dearth of scholarly writing about the Great Famine. Since then the drought has been broken by a deluge. Some outpourings are far from scholarly; some fall into the category of what D.H. Atkenson has recently described as "Famine porn" as their authors scour the lexicon of shocking vocabulary to arouse our indignation.

The publication of Jonathan Clark's English Society in 1985 marked the appearance of a new and original revisionist historiography of the long eighteenth century.

In writing about alien immigrants to England and their reception in the sixteenth century Laura Yungblut has identified a subject that has long cried out for further study, both detailed research into particular features of immigrant communities and broader overviews to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of specialised journal articles, articles often unavailable even in many university li

Professor Fryde's new study represents a substantive - and substantial - contribution to the history of land tenure, economic change and social development in later medieval England.