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With over seven hundred volumes published, the Variorum Collected Studies Series has branched out considerably from its origins in late antique and medieval history. Recent forays into imperial history, for example, have generated collections of articles by some of the biggest names in the field.

Until 1975 those who wanted to study the history of English prisons turned to the standard work on the subject which was first published in 1922, English Prisons Under Local Government, by the two pioneers of the history of English Social Policy Sidney and Beatrice Webb.(1) This carefully researched account emphasised the evolution of the

Margot Finn’s book The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 is the first volume in a new series published by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories) which seeks to draw social and cultural history more closely together.

Early and silent cinema is generally ghettoised in popular culture. Early film, British or otherwise, is mostly seen by the public on television as illustrations for documentaries and is rarely, if ever, the subject of them. Yet the study of early British cinema is the study of a still relevant, living entity.

Simon Potter’s book is a study of ‘imperial integration’ through the analysis of what he terms ‘an imperial press system’ which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (p. 1). It focuses on the Dominions of Britain, or what has in recent historiography been referred to as the ‘British world’, embraced by a common sense of Britishness.

The central theme of this book can be summed up as ‘neither electoral sociology nor linguistic turn’. Instead, its author emphasises the micro context of politics – how local social and cultural milieux shaped the reception of political ideas, and hence the fortunes of political parties.

Laura E. Nym Mayhall begins her book by re-telling the familiar story of the arrest in 1909 of Marion Wallace Dunlop, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which led to her imprisonment and notoriety as the ‘first hunger striker’. In doing so, she focuses on the action that led to the arrest.

Peter Hart’s ten chapters explore the IRA in what is defined by him as the Irish Revolution of 1916–23. All essays save two have been published over the last decade as book chapters or articles in leading academic journals. All deserve to be revisited. Thematically organised, Hart examines the structure of revolutionary violence in Irish and wider British contexts.

It is curious that it should have taken imperial proconsul Lord Cromer (1841–1917, Evelyn Baring until 1892) nearly a century to find a scholarly biographer worthy of his centrality to British, imperial and Egyptian history in the Victorian-Edwardian age.

Trauma has become a burning topic in Western cultures of late. Traumatic events and debates over how they are remembered by individuals and memorialised by cultures are important for lots of different constituencies.