This is the first in a new series of single volume histories of the historic Welsh counties. To encompass the history of a county within the space of less than 200 pages is a challenge; all the counties of Wales have their own distinct identities, but Anglesey, being an island, is more distinct than most. At the same time any historian approaching the history of a county has to keep in touch with the main trends of national history and show how this history has manifested itself within a territory which is both a microcosm of the nation and a community with its own identity and history. The author, himself an Anglesey man, has risen to the challenge and in six chapters he has taken the story from the emergence of Anglesey as an island to the present day. We read of the great Iron Age votive deposit at Llyn Cerrig Bach, of the beginnings of the kingship of Gwynedd based on Aberffraw and of the recently discovered evidence of Viking settlement at Llanbedr-goch. Perhaps in the discussion of the medieval period there is a tendency to generalise, but the main trends are brought out. The powerful Anglesey-based family which snatched the greatest prize of all in 1485 is placed in its context and the later power struggles between local families, particularly the Bulkeleys of Beaumaris, whose political and social domination survived until the late nineteenth century, are not ignored, nor are the changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Major change begins in the eighteenth century; the discovery of rich copper deposits on Mynydd Trysglwyn (Parys Mountain) made the island for a time the centre of the world copper industry under the control of a local attorney, Thomas Williams. Like the rest of Wales, Anglesey felt the impact of the Methodist Revival and was particularly associated with two figures, the Baptist, Christmas Evans, and the Calvinistic Methodist, John Elias. By the end of the century the campaign for a bridge across the Menai Straits was gathering momentum and Telford's suspension bridge was opened in 1826, to be followed by the coming of the railway and the bridging of the Straits by Robert Stephenson in 1850. The eighteenth century saw one of Anglesey's greatest poets, Goronwy Owen, and the astonishing Morris brothers who were significant contributors to the Welsh cultural revival of the period and whose letters shed so much light on contemporary life. When discussing the nineteenth century the author deals with the impact of such national topics as the rise of nonconformity, the growth of political radicalism and the 1847 Education Reports, but it is the local developments which will be of most interest to the reader. The pioneering attempt to organise the agricultural labourer, associated with the journalist John Owen Jones (Ap Ffarmwr), did not succeed, but the fight continued; ironically the farmers, who were less than enlightened employers, were among the leaders of the nonconformist fight against the gentry; the shipowning Davies family, one of whom was the first nonconformist MP for the island and then the first nonconformist Lord Lieutenant, had an equally bad reputation. The triumph of political nonconformity was symbolised by the removal of the county town from Beaumaris to Llangefni following the election of the first County Council in 1888. Like so much of rural Wales, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglesey was a place of grinding rural poverty and deprivation; in 1933 unemployment in the county amounted to 42.1 per cent of the insured population, and alongside this was the scourge of tuberculosis. Anglesey politics were and are rather more individualistic and volatile than those of its neighbours. In 1918 the county elected the first Labour MP in rural north Wales and since 1945 the seat has been held by all four of the main Welsh parties. Intriguingly, Anglesey was the first British education authority to adopt a system of universal comprehensive education. The story is brought up to the present day with the examination of the increasing dependence of the economy on tourism, the underlying problems of that same economy, Anglesey being one of the most deprived regions of Wales, and the cultural effects of immigration from England. Mr Pretty has produced a comprehensive and readable history which will be of interest both to Monwysion and to all who know this highly individualistic community.