This book deals with the thought of William Harrison, a well-known Elizabethan intellectual, whose ideas are significant chiefly because they are often representative of the thoroughgoing Protestantism which adapted continental reformed ideas to the circumstances of Tudor England. The book explains how the mentality of Harrison, a university-trained Protestant, reveals a coherent worldview based upon a particular view of history which he applied to many areas of contemporary concern: the complete reformation of the church, the improvement of society, the removal of economic injustice, the reorientation of practical life and the restraint of the dangerous speculation current in natural philosophy. Dr Parry draws upon a unique and previously unknown manuscript source, Harrison's interpretation of world history, which provides unusually detailed information about how one individual interpreted the world.

In his book, Mr Cowling describes the relationship between British party politics and the conduct of British foreign policy between Hitler's arrival in office in 1933 and Chamberlain's resignation in May 1940. He sets British policy in the context of European, Imperial, League, national and isolational sentiments and takes account of the strategic and financial limitations within which decisions were made. He shows how far prime ministers, foreign secretaries and the cabinet responded to parliamentary criticism, and argues that, from mid–1936 onwards, foreign policy and the prospects of the party system were so intimately connected that neither can be understood in isolation from the other.

This study examines the Law Reports of Sir John Davies and litigation pleaded before the central Irish courts during the period in which Davies served in Ireland as solicitor-general (1603–6) and attorney-general (1606–19). The author's main concern is to explicate the legal and jurisprudential issues involved and to draw out their deeper political implications. He argues that, in the absence of a malleable parliament, judge-made law became the instrument by which the Jacobean regime consolidated the Tudor conquest. The book also touches on the influence of the implementation of the law on the Irish coinage, Gaelic tenurial customs and religious conformity. More controversial themes include the origins of precedent in the Anglo-American legal tradition, the use of continental civil law in common law litigation and the relationship of early modern Ireland to the development of an imperial jurisprudence.

The period from 1680 to about 1720 was one of the most complex and difficult in the history of British politics, to contemporaries as well as to posterity. The parameters of political obligation were decisively shifted by the Revolution of 1688; statesmen and politicians had now to accustom themselves to the novelty of a parliament in session every year; Britain was almost continuously engaged in the most ambitious and expensive wars in her history to date; political parties were slow to form, and of doubtful repute when they did. Professor Kenyon's Ford Lectures, delivered in Oxford in 1976 and now published as a paperback for the first time, remain a standard account of the period. For this reissue, Professor Kenyon has written a new preface which discusses the book in the light of recent historiography.

At the time of the Dreyfus Affair and the start of the Action Française, Charles Maurras pressed forward the idea, borrowed from Auguste Comte, of an alliance between Positivists and Catholics. The compatibility of Maurras's own Positivist political ideas with Catholic principles was later questioned by Marc Sangnier, and the ensuing polemic between the two men was itself the origin of a lengthy controversy in which the two leading figures were the philosophers Maurice Blondel and Lucien Laberthonnière, both of whom strongly contested Catholic indulgence towards Maurras and the Action Française. This study of Maurrassian ideology and Catholic reactions to it explores a wide range of themes. They include the posterity of Comte's Positivism, anti-semitism at the turn of the twentieth century, the absolutism and romanticism of Maurras's nationalism, the crucial importance of the separation of Church and State for the somewhat fortuitous identification of the Action Française with the cause of Rome, and the confrontation of Maurras's idea of the Roman Church with the Christian ideals upheld by Blondel and Laberthonnière.