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I should like to thank Sonja Levsen for her generous words about many aspects of my book.
First, I would like to thank Ingrid Tague for a very thorough and thoughtful discussion of my book. I have only a minor factual correction to make. In her summary of chapter four, Tague states that neither Mary Wroth nor William Herbert were married during their affair.
The title was inspired by the birth, during the writing of this volume, of a child named after the author. A second volume will bring the survey to the present and to some glimpses of that young woman's prospects. The prospect presented here is that of the sleepy young knitter of the 18th century pictured on the cover and of generations before her.
It is very gratifying to respond to Pat Thane's very positive review of my book because she has raised issues that I considered very important and captured what I intended to be the spirit of the work. My purpose when I embarked on the enterprise reflecte d my own personal predilections as to the kind of history I wanted to write.
This is a very puzzling book. To judge by its title and some of its contents, its subject is the attempt to create a world order on the basis of two competing principles, adumbrated respectively in the West and in Russia. Those two principles are summed up in the figures of Montesquieu and Marx, whose ideas on social order are briefly set out in the first two chapters.
As Patrick O'Brien says in Reviewers and Reviewing: a Manifesto for a New Electronic Journal, 'Historians are all aware that the conceptual framework for the construction of historical knowledge is changing rapidly.' It was my own awareness of such change that
Edmund Dell has moved from his highly praised account of the early years of the Callaghan administration, which he observed and in which he participated as a government minister, to the last years of the Attlee administration.
I am grateful for the generous and appreciative words that Professor Griffiths writes about my book or, at least, its final two-thirds. But, inevitably, this response must be concerned with his criticisms.
'Much nonsense has been written on this subject', wrote Keith Thomas in a famous and influential footnote to his own pioneering chapter on English witchcraft in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).
I'm very grateful to Euan Cameron for such a thoughtful and constructive review, which has forced me to think very hard about some of the broader implications of my own arguments. While it is certainly flattering to be portrayed as a highly original i nterpreter, I had not seen myself as cutting quite such a swathe through the conventional wisdom, nor as so ferocious a critic of others.