At times one reads a book crammed full of provocative ideas about a subject which, in the recent past, has been rather unproductive of new material.<i>Background to Migraine</i>, which contains the edited transcript of the First Migraine Symposium held at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London, is such a book. Even the foreword by the British Minister of Health is worth reading—short, to the point, with a bit of dialectic, and a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. R. Blend and James W. D. Bull present their experience with the radiological investigation of patients with migraine. M. D. O'Brien, N. Veall, and H. R. A. Townsend discuss measurements of cerebral blood flow and electroencephalography in migrainous patients, and the literature on vasospasm in migraine is summarized by Lindsay Simon. Polypeptides, amine changes, and other biochemical determinations relating to migraine are covered concisely by J. M. Robson, C. A. Keele, G.