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A History of Nigeria is an impressive book, the more so because its ambitions initially appear straightforward. Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton describe their project as ‘a general background survey of the broad themes of Nigeria’s history from the beginnings of human habitation … to the early twenty-first century’ (p.

Confucius once remarked that rulers need three resources: weapons, food and trust. The ruler who cannot have all three should give up weapons first, then food, but should hold on to trust at all costs: 'without trust we cannot stand'.(1) Machiavelli disagreed.

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.

Ernest Gellner, who died on 5 November 1995, was one of the great polymaths of the century. Many of his twenty books were concerned with philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Yet at the core of his work was an historical question.

Do we get the history of parliament we actually deserve or the one we want to see? From the broad Whiggish vistas of the 19th century to the Namierite views of the 20th century, to the post-revisionist views of the 21st, more than most history the sources and narratives on this remarkable institution of parliament were always significant and seem to reflect the history we wish to see.

Selling the Tudor Monarchy is large, colourful, contentious and far-reaching. It is the first of three volumes stretching from the 15th to the 18th centuries, examining the representations of monarchs from Henry VII to Queen Anne. This is a bold undertaking, but this first volume suggests that it is one very much suited to Kevin Sharpe’s strengths.

The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe is a collection of papers which originated in a 2005 conference at the University of Miami. The women examined in the essays include queens regnant, consorts and various regents all of whom exercised power either in their own right or through their marital or familial ties.

This issue contains 11 articles by leading scholars of the reign, together with the guest editor’s introduction (in addition to his two articles), and an impressively extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources including unpublished theses.

In this brilliant and provocative book, Steve Pincus creates a welcome stir that will enliven the study of the later 17th century. Its author is like his revolutionary Whig subjects: self-conscious and polemical about a desire to set things on a new footing. The result is a bracing, combative, highly stimulating argument, written in vivid and lively prose.

The cover to the hardback edition of Edward Vallance’s A Radical History of Britain shows a Union Jack superimposed on a montage (King John signing the Magna Carta, the German Peasants’ War of 1525 (1), the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Jarrow Crusade and the Battle of Cable Street) designed to illustrate the book’s subtitle: Visionaries, Rebels and Revol