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In 1990 John Morrill edited a collection of essays entitled Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution.(1) It was based on the premise that Cromwell was too complex and difficult a subject to be best summed up by a single biographer, and so should be tackled by a team which represented the best current experts in different aspects of his personality and activi

The civil wars that engulfed the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland in the mid-17th century remain a battlefield, and generation after generation they retain a capacity to provoke passionate debate and heated historical controversy.

Andrew Thorpe’s monograph is a wide-ranging, meticulously researched study of political organisation in Britain during the Second World War, one that makes an important contribution to the historiography of the period.

Harold Macmillan once said that what he feared most was ‘events’. Jack Lynch was one of those politicians who was ambushed by ‘events’. Before 1969, he seemed to have a talent for avoiding the arrogance and mud that normally congeal on those who climb the greasy pole, and projecting himself as gentle, decent, moderate, honest, and dutiful.

The line of modern British Prime Ministers is remarkable for the numerous authors included in its number. Lord Grey wrote a volume on the causes of the French Revolution. Disraeli produced a shelf of novels. Balfour contributed volumes of philosophy. Churchill put his indelible mark on the writing of 20th-century international and British history.

The clash between radicalism and loyalism in the early industrial revolution period created the basic progressive-conservative political divide that was to structure British politics until the fall of communism.

Glenn Richardson’s latest contribution to early modern Anglo-French relations comes in the form of this edited volume covering nearly three centuries of contact between England and France from 1420 to 1700. The Contending Kingdoms is essentially the proceedings of a Society for Court Studies conference which took place in London in November 2004.

This is a very carefully researched and well-written account of reactions within Britain to the Soviet Union during the industrialisation and forced collectivisation programmes of the 1930s.

A Man and an Institution is in reality three books combined into one. It is, first, a contribution to a biography of Sir Maurice Hankey, the first Cabinet Secretary; second, a history of the origins of the Cabinet Office and its development until Hankey’s retirement in 1938; and third, an account of how the Cabinet Office came to be the guardian of official secrecy.

The Blackwell Companions to British History enjoy a reputation for quality of scholarship, clarity of text and range.