Hugh Trevor-Roper Research Articles

What Happened and Why? Helping Students Read and Write Like Historians

JVIOST HISTORIANS know how important questions are to their enterprise. The poet W.H. Auden understood that good scholarship can only come from good questions, saying is, strictly speaking, study of questions. Others have concurred. The great British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, the function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions. But where do good questions come from? In history, as in most social sciences and humanities, this is a key concern, though one often neglected in teaching of our disciplinary methodologies. How do historians—or, for that matter, all good scholars—use questions to frame their analyses? More practically, how can students' understanding of this process of problematizing help them read and write history more effectively? What follows are my thoughts on subject, thoughts that have emerged from a decade of teaching undergraduates at a liberal arts college in New England. Additionally, years of working with high school educators who teach advanced placement United States history have convinced me that principles of good scholarly investigation are also applicable to students at high school level. The key to improving asking of good questions at either level, it seems to me, is developing a better understanding of how professional historians do their work.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

Communing with ‘the laity’: exceptionalism, postmodernism and the urban biography

For as historians are compelled to grind out their specified quota of specialized articles and inaccessible monographs, which are at best read only by a handful of professional colleagues, and are at worst almost completely ignored, this makes them less and less able to fulfil that essential public function which remains their real and abiding justification: satisfying the interest and furthering the comprehension of that broader, non-professional audience memorably described by Hugh Trevor-Roper as ‘the laity’ (David Cannadine, 1999).

George Buchanan's vernacular polemics, 1570-1572

attributed to him. Perhaps the best known of these is the infamous 'Memorial', the spirited defence ofMary's deposition that the Earl of Morton presented to Queen Elizabeth in February 1571, which Hugh Trevor-Roper attributed to Buchanan, and on which depends so much of his case that Buchanan was an intellectual charlatan.2 Another is the hitherto unprinted 'Dialogue of the Twa Wyfeis', a satirical attack on the Machiavellianism of the Queen's Party dating from early 1570, which Mark Loughlin has speculated might be from Buchanan's pen.3 And finally, there is a little known pamphlet published anonymously by Robert Lekprevik at St Andrews in 1572 entitled Ane Discourse Tuiching the Estait Present in October Anno Domini 1571, which

Kosovo – A Short History

By the early-1980s Kosovo had reached a state of permanent crisis and military occupation, and it became the main focus for the revival of Serbian nationalism. This book traces the history of Kosovo, examining the Yugoslavian conflict, and the part played by Western Europe in its destruction. 'This is a profound and important book, essential reading for those who wish to understand either the complex history or the present politics of Yugoslavia.' - Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sunday Telegraph. 'A dreadnought of a book, all big guns, covering the whole history of Kosovo, with an authority that is often breathtaking and never oppressive.' - Norman Stone, Sunday Times.

Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil

The Tichbornes, The Doughtys and Douglas Woodruff

Of what he called ‘The Great Fear of Popery’, Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘that fear … constantly renewed, had acquired a momentum of its own. It was the English equivalent of the great European witch-craze, and it would remain formidable for three centuries, a national neurosis which could be awakened again and again: in the myth of the great Irish massacre of 1641 (still repeated, over a century later, by John Wesley), in the great scare of the Popish Plot of 1678, in the fable of the Warming Pan in 1688, even, though with dwindling force, in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the “Papal Aggression” of 1851, ‘(sic). He might have added the Tichborne trial to the list.

The Witch "She"/The Historian "He": Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch-Hunts

übernational trends: The Witch "She'VThe Historian "He": Gender and the Historiography of the European Witch-Hunts Elspeth Whitney The European witch-hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of those events, Uke the decline and faU of the Roman Empire, which is so complex and resonant that its historiography has almost become a field in itself. Once dismissed as an inexplicable outbreak of mass hysteria unworthy of serious scholarly attention, the witch-hunt is now more often seen as a central event in the formation of early modern Europe which iUuminates larger social and cultural issues. Since Hugh Trevor-Roper inaugurated contemporary scholarship on the subject in 1967, the hunt has come to provide for many scholars a useful focus for analysis of, among other things, the shifting interactions of high and popular culture, the emergence of the modern state or a more "individualistic" ethos, the expansion of bureaucratic elites and the impact of newly empowered "experts," the magistrate and the priest, on vülage life. Curiously, however, there has been relatively little attention paid as yet to exploring the relationship between the witch-hunts and issues relating to gender, in particular the question of why witches were women. Although discussions of this topic have recently (since the late 1980s) become more common, this area of inquiry and others related to gender and the hunts remain surprisingly undeveloped. In the present essay I would like to examine the current state of scholarship on gender and the hunts and suggest some directions for further work. Gender is dearly central in some way to the witch-hunts. That the vast majority of witches were women has been a commonplace of modem research as much as it was to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on demonology. Whether or not we wish to characterize witch-hunting simply as "woman-hunting," or to emphasize that accused witches were most often a particular type of woman, it remains clear that the witch was seen as inverting not only the natural order in general but specificaUy the image of the "good woman." Yet the questions "why were witches women?" or its converse, "why were women witches?" have received short shrift among historians of the European witch hunts.1 While virtuaUy every other asped of the hunts has been debated, the central element that witches were beUeved to be women, has remained, for most scholars, © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 78 Journal of Women's History Fall unproblematic. ExpUdtly or impUcitly it is assumed that a sort of timeless, "natural" misogyny present in Western culture can adequately explain why the coUective image of the witch was that of an ül-tempered, older woman. Conversely, it is argued that misogyny has been so permanent a charaderistic of Western culture that it cannot be considered the cause of so specific an event as the witch-hunts. Yet leaving the question there in fact does Uttle to explain why women were attacked in this way at this time. Nor does it help to üluminate the specific nature of witch beliefs and witch practices, even paradoxicaUy the oft-repeated observation that some witches were male. The extent to which gender has "faUen out" as a category of analysis among the majority of historians of the witch-hunts is quite startling. Despite the use of sophisticated methodologies borrowed from anthropology , sodology, and folkloric studies, the main lines of interpretation of the hunts have been construded largely outside of work in women's history or gender studies. It is unlikely today to find sudi egregious stereotypical remarks as that of Trevor-Roper, who in 1967 described folk witch beliefs as "the mental rubbish of peasant creduUty and feminine hysteria," or JuUo Caro Baroja's suggestion that "a woman usually becomes a witch after the initial failure of her Ufe as a woman, after frustrated or Ulegitimate love affairs have left her with a sense of impotence or disgrace."2 Nevertheless, the bulk of published research on the European hunts at the present time either ignores gender or, even while taking note of the relevance of women's history and feminist analysis, tends to minimize its...

:Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar

1. Van Dyck and George Gage Susan Barnes 2. Patrons and Collectors of Dutch Painting in Britain Christopher Brown 3. Foreigners at Court: Holbein, Van Dyck and the Painters Stainers Company Susan Foister 4. The etchings of Joh Evelyn Antony Griffiths 5. The Politics of Inigo Jones David Howarth 6. The Standard Bearer: Van Dyck's portraits of Sir Sir Edmund Verney Michael Jaffe 7. Sir Peter Lely and Sir Ralph Bankes Alastair Laing 8. Isaac Besnier: his sculpture for court patrons Ronald Lightbrown 9. Laudian Literature and the interpretation of Caroline Churches in London John Newman 10. Clarendon and the art of prose portraiture in the age of Charles II Richard Ollard 11. The Great Picture of Lady Anne Clifford Graham Parry 12. Golden Houses for Shadows: Some Portraits of Thomas Killigrew and his Family Malcolm Rogers 13. Reflections on Sir Godfrey Kneller as Painter of Histories and Portraits Histories J. Douglas Stewart 14. Mayerne and his manuscript Hugh Trevor-Roper.

:From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution

This collection is the third in a series which gathers the best historical essays of Hugh Trevor-Roper, considered by many the unequalled master of the form. The pieces here range from an account of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's mission in China in the sixteenth century to a discussion of the Anglo-Scottish Union. They include essays on medicine at the early Stuart Court, on the plunder of artistic treasures in Europe during the wars of the seventeenth century, on the plans of Hugo Grotius to create a new universal church on an Anglican base, on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and religious toleration thereafter. There are also biographical studies of Archbishop Laud, Matthew Wren, the Earl of Clarendon, and Prince Rupert. As Noel argument wrote in Hugh Trevor-Roper has perfected the historical essay as the most beguiling form of enlightening readers about the past. He is the most eloquent, sophisticated and assured historian of Our Age, and has never written an inelegant sentence or produced an incoherent arguement.

Bosnia: A Short History

Bosnia: A Short History was celebrated on its first publication as a brilliant work of history which set the terrible war in the Balkans in its full historical and political context. This revised edition has been updated with a new chapter that covers the events of 1993-1995 and remains the definitive work on the complex history of Bosnia. 'A quite brilliant piece of historical record-straightening. Everyone who wishes to have an opinion about Bosnia must read this book.' - Niall Ferguson, Daily Mail. 'Clear-sighted, authoritative and eloquent.' - Dimitri Obolensky, Times Literary Supplement. 'A Triumph of clarity, learning and balance.' - Adrian Hastings, New Statesman and Society. 'Excellent.' - Paddy Ashdown, Sunday Times. 'This is a splendid work of synthesis on a very complex subject, written with insight and sympathy: the best, indeed the only, informed book on a history that has become both topical and tragic.' - Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sunday Telegraph. 'A marvellous book, a work of great scholarship.' - Margaret Thatcher.

INOPPORTUNE

Journal Article INOPPORTUNE Get access The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vols 1–3. By EDWARD GIBBON, with an Introduction by HUGH TREVOR-ROPER, Everyman's Library 1993; £25. DAVID WOMERSELEY DAVID WOMERSELEY Jesus CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume XLIV, Issue 4, October 1994, Pages 339–346, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XLIV.4.339 Published: 01 October 1994

Strategies in Jacobean Polemic: The Use and Abuse of St Augustine in English Theological Controversy

It is well known that following the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 English Catholic and Protestant polemicists turned to the Church Fathers, and particularly to St Augustine, for source material with which to bolster their doctrinal arguments. Augustine's works were, of course, the basis for so many Reformation controversies, yet the theological disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were entirely different from those of the Early Church. Further development and refinement of doctrine had created a wide gulf between the two periods. Early modern polemic was therefore relying on patristic sources which at times were patently inappropriate. It might therefore be thought that there would be little to be gained from an examination of its use of the Fathers, particularly as there was no reason for bitterly opposed polemicists to take a restrained, objective, or even particularly discerning approach to the patristic sources in order to refute the ‘errors’ of the other side. Historians of the English Reformation have indeed shown little interest in the seventeenth century's preoccupation with St Augustine, the most widely cited of the patristic writers. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that in this period ‘the true meaning of St Augustine was the object of as much unprofitable speculation as has ever been expended on the equally inscrutable mind of God’. Those historians who have dealt briefly with polemical technique in this period have suggested that seventeenth-century uses of patristic texts were likely to be primitive. J. C. H. Aveling argued that both Catholic and Protestant writers were afflicted by the same weaknesses: their understanding of source texts was undermined by a ‘cult of great erudition’ which was essentially shallow.

The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact

List of plates List of illustrations List of abbreviations Editor's preface Foreword by the President of the British Academy General introduction Jonathan I. Israel Part I. The Glorious Revolution: 1. James II's Revolution: royal policies, 1686-92 J. R. Jones 2. The sensible revolution John Morrill 3. The Dutch role in the glorious revolution Jonathan I. Israel 4. Church and state reformed? the revolution of 1688-9 in Scotland Ian B. Cowan 5. The Williamite revolution in Ireland, 1688-91 D. W. Hayton 6. The revolution of 1688-9 in the American colonies Richard R. Johnson 7. The revolution of 1688-9 and the English republican tradition Blair Wordern Part II. Background and World Impact: 8. Freedom in seventeenth-century Dutch thought and practice E. H. Kossman 9. William III, Brandenburg, and the construction of the anti-French coalition, 1672-88 Wouter Troost 10. Of providence and protestant winds: the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the Dutch armada of 1688 Jonathan I. Israel and Geoffrey Parker 11. The Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 and the House of Savoy Robert Oresko 12. Sequel to revolution: the economics of England's emergence as a Great Power, 1688-1712 D. W. Jones 13. The English and Dutch East India Companies and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9 K. N. Chaudhuri and Jonathan I. Israel 14. William III and the Glorious Revolution in the eyes of Amsterdam Sephardi writers: the reactions of Miguel de Barrios, Joseph Penso de la Vega, and Manuel de Leao Harm den Boer and Jonathan I. Israel 15. A fateful alliance? William III and England in Dutch historiography, 1688-9 to 1988-9 P. J. A. N. Rietbergen 16. Epilogue: the glorious revolution Hugh Trevor-Roper Index.

ON THE THEORY AND POLITICS OF CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION IN THE PACIFIC

The premise that culture is symbolically constructed or ' invented' has become a hallmark of social-science scholarship in the postmodern era. Cultural invention is part of the intellectual Zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s although not all of its invocations can be categorized as * postmodernist'. In the early 1980s anthropologists working independently in a number of Pacific Islands societies began to view 'culture' alternately, 'tradition' oxkastom as a symbolic construction, a contemporary human product rather than a passively inheritedlegacy (see Babadzan 1988; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin 1983).1 The impetus for this shift in perspective did not originate in Pacific anthropology, but can be traced to a more general dissatisfaction in the social sciences with positivist and objectivist approaches to culture and related concepts in Western scholarship. The more or less simultaneous appearance of these Pacific case studies, Anderson's (1983) Imagined Communities, and the Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) volume Tlie Invention of Tradition demonstrates a striking cross-disciplinary convergence in a line of inquiry, albeit not as I elaborate below the emergence of a unified theory. This paper examines the theoretical notion of cultural construction in the light of the perceived political dilemmas associated with its application, in this case, to Pacific Islands societies. The essay's primary aims are twofold: to clarify and situate this concept theoretically, and to address the pragmatic aspects of cultural construction as a discursive mode in and about Pacific societies. I begin by emphasizing that the study of cultural invention in the Pacific has affinities with analogous projects not only in anthropology but in other disciplines. Placing this rubric in the broader context of current social-science theory and applications may explain why the exploration of cultural construction has become a theoretical imperative for many anthropologists. For all the perceived theoretical sophistication of this new approach, however, talking about the invention of culture in any specific social context is fraught with practical, political, and ethical problems. One wonders how Scottish nationalists, for example, may have reacted to Hugh Trevor-Roper's (1983) demolition of the vaunted 'Highland Tradition' as a set of 'fabrications'. A number of Pacific anthropologists have expressed concern about the way cultural construction 'plays' outside the academy. Particularly at issue is how this arguably rather abstruse academic argument may be represented in the politicized contexts of Pacific Island nations and colonies. The misgivings have recently been publicly articulated in reference to Allan Hanson' s (1989) article demonstrating that certain key tropes in Maori oral tradition were authored by European scholars.2 Hanson' s piece provoked angry reactions on the part of some Maori and Pakeha scholars in New Zealand (see Wilford 1990). The tenor of these responses points to a fundamental problem: that ' invention' is itself an inflammatory word, inescapably implying something fictitious, ' made up' and therefore not real (cf . Hanson 1991:450).

Renaissance Essays. Hugh Trevor-Roper

<i>Renaissance Essays</i>. Hugh Trevor-Roper

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays. By Hugh Trevor-Roper. The University of Chicago Press, 1988. 317 pages. $27.50. J. Wayne Baker J. Wayne Baker The University of Akron Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LX, Issue 1, Spring 1992, Pages 185–188, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LX.1.185 Published: 01 March 1992

The Trevor-Roper Trap or the Imperialism of History. An Essay

This is, as the title makes clear, an essay; that is to say, a genre in which it is considered legitimate for the author to put forward his own more or less (in this case rather more) subjective viewpoints. As such it contains quite a number of short cuts and mouthfuls. I have also deemed it necessary, for the sake of the logic of the argumentation, to make occasional and rather long de-tours via a number of obvious, and at times downright elementary, points. My excuse is that the genre virtually requires it. And my hope is that the following pages will provide at least some food for thought.Back in the early 1960s the distinguished Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper of Oxford University proclaimed, as every Africanist probably knows, that at least precolonial Black Africa had no history. He must have meant what he said, for he repeated his contention in 1969 by putting the label “unhistoric” on the African continent; the whole of the African continent that is, including Ethiopia, Egypt, and the Maghrib.On the face of it there is little reason why we should bother with this type of point of view now in the 1990s. After all, the avalanche of articles and books on African history—including several multi-volume General Histories—which have been published since the 1960s, in a sense bear testimony to the absurdity of Trevor-Roper's position.And yet, for all that, I am not quite certain that the malaise engendered by Trevor-Roper and his like has been entirely dissipated. After all, Trevor-Roper remains a frequently-quoted historian. But more to the point, there is often in my opinion a rather embarrassing insistence in the specialist Africanist litera¬ture on the “extraordinary complexity and dynamism” of Black Africa's past; an insistence not infrequently coupled with the urge, apparently never appeased, to put to rest the myth of Primitive Africa. There is also an equally embarrassing insistence on behalf of many Africanists to pin the label “state” on even the tiniest of polities in precolonial Africa, thus obscuring the appar¬ent fact that perhaps a majority of Africans in the precolonial era lived in so-called “acephalous” societies.

Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 671 new. Doubtless much in his construction is speculative, difficult to demonstrate conclusively ; but he has amassed sufficient evidence to establish some degree of plausibility for much of his account, enough so that those who would attempt to refute his theory will surely have to come up with some new evidence, or at least a significant reworking of the existing evidence. Whether or not Bos' conclusions are true, they are sure to incite a new direction in Aristotelian studies. The title of the book is mildly misleading. Most of the book is concerned with "cosmic" theology in the lost dialogues, and "meta-cosmic" theology is mentioned chiefly by contrast. Despite Bos' theory of the meaning ofexoterikoi logoi,one might well wonder just how much discussion of the Unmoved Mover one might have found in the dialogues, by comparison with Metaphysics Lambda, Physics8, and related passages in the corpus. Given the evidence Bos presents, one might imagine that the dialogues differ at least in emphasis from the corpus in that they must have presented a far more vivid picture of celestial divinity. ANTHONY PREUS State Universityof New York, Binghamton Hugh Trevor-Roper. Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 317 . NP. This fine collection of five previously unpublished essays begins with an attempt to find out who Nicholas Hill was, and why he wrote Philosophia Epicurea, Democritiana, Theophrastica (16ol), one of the earliest modern atomist works. Through some ingenious detective work, Trevor-Roper builds up a case that Hill, an English Catholic, was influenced by Bruno's visit to England, and by his theories, and tried in a minor way to set up a utopia right after Tommaso Campanella's attempt in 16ol. The last essay seeks to interpret John Milton's political views, from preRevolutionary times to his writing of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, by showing his changes as expressions of Milton's egotism, rather than a continuous or coherent political theory, even in his writings during the Puritan Revolution and the Cromwell Protectorate. The three middle essays, "Laudianism and Political Power," "James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh" and "The Great Tew Circle," have a common core, and present some important perspectives for understanding seventeenth-century intellectual developments . Trevor-Roper insists that one has to see and understand intellectual developments in seventeenth-century England both in their political, social, and religious context, and as part of what was happening in Europe during the period of the Thirty Years' War, the rise of Calvinist orthodoxy in the Netherlands, and the interaction of continental ideas with English ones. The central essays portray and analyze the interplay of historical and prophetic Millenarianism as the account of what was going on, against the counterview that theology was beyond human knowledge, and that a kind of sceptical understanding of religion as a way of life, as a practice, could provide a basis for a social and political 672 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:4 OCTOBER 1991 world. The Reformation had caused a fundamental reconsideration of man in history. One Protestant version, presented in various forms in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, Sweden and elsewhere, was that mankind was emerging from a drastic theological blight--the Reign of Antichrist, the Church of Rome and the Papacy . True Christianity, which had existed in early times, and was suppressed by Rome, reappeared sporadically in the movements of the Waldensians, the Hussites, the followers of Wyclif, and now was blossoming as the result of Luther and Calvin. The significance of this was described in prophecy, especially in the scriptural books of Daniel and Revelation, which indicated that the final chapter of human history, with the return of Jesus, would soon occur. Humans could prepare for this by perfecting themselves, their societies and their religious institutions. In the early seventeenth century this combined with Francis Bacon's advancement of learning, with different nationalisms proving that certain countries or societies would be the Millenial Kingdom , the New Israel. "I'revor-Roper shows that Archbishop Ussher, now regarded as a crank for telling us that the world was created in 4004 B.c., was a most eminent polemical Millenarian scholar...

Spain and Its World, 1500-1700: Selected Essays.

In these essays the pre-eminent historian of early modern Spain and its world looks at the character of the Spanish Habsburg court; the ties between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, the rest of Europe, and the New World; and the decline of Spanish world power. 'Professor Elliott is our most distinguished historian of the imperial age of Spain, and in 'Spain and Its World' he has collected twelve essays which illustrate several of the great and continuing problems of that history ... These are wonderful essays, erudite and yet lucid, wide-ranging but full of fascinating detail, by a master of the subject. They are beautifully written and a delight to read.' Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Sunday Telegraph 'An elegantly designed work prefaced by a personal memoir of his journey through Spanish history ... For anyone interested in the history of empire, of Europe and of Spain, here is a book to keep within reach, to read, to study and to enjoy.' John Lynch, 'Times Literary Supplement' 'Elliott's contribution to our knowledge of the history of Imperial Spain is immense ... The author combines solid historical research with a smooth narrative style to produce elegant essays which inform, stimulate, and frequently entertain the reader.' 'Virginia Quarterly Review' J. H. Elliott was Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. He is the author of 'The Count-Duke of Olivares', 'A Palace for a King' (with Jonathan Brown) and 'Empires of the Atlantic World'.