While it also includes pieces on John Milton and the Earl of Clarendon, this book has an inner coherence that many collections of essays lack. Yet of course it does not claim to tell the whole story. The army, in particular, is a mysterious presence here, intervening powerfully and then stepping back into the shadows. Scotland and Ireland are mostly wrapped in Celtic twilight; foreign policy, which at times dominated the nation's attention, is treated rather in passing; some intellectual and religious changes of the period remain noises off. More will be revealed, no doubt, when Blair Worden completes his biography of Cromwell — a book on which he has been working for many years, and which anyone interested in 17th-century England will want and need to read.