One half of this book covers the years 1500 to 1640, with attention spread fairly evenly over the period. The second half deals with the decades of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. ‘British’ here means English and Scottish, but the history seems more to visit Scotland from time to time than to view it continuously; still, the discussions of Buchanan and others are worthwhile. Burgess characterises the book as a ‘general introduction’ to its field, and it seems geared especially to a student (upper-level undergraduate or starting postgraduate) readership. He announces at the outset that ‘the interaction of religious belief and political ideas’ will be a central concern, and indeed this is referred to repeatedly, but it is not omnipresent. The book is essentially a survey of ‘major political thinkers of the period it covers’ (p. xii). Political thought is defined ‘conservatively’; ‘canonical writers’ who are discussed at greatest length are More, Hooker, Hobbes, the Levellers and James Harrington; others who receive at least five pages are Starkey, Ponet, Knox, Buchanan, Robert Persons, Thomas Craig, Sir John Davies, James vi and i, Filmer, Winstanley and Nedham. The political texts are presented with very little context – the reader needs to have learned elsewhere about the political circumstances from which they came. At times, the reader can feel that she or he is simply going from one mini-essay to another, without enough synthesising or shaping comment. The chapters on the seventeenth century have more momentum and direction, and in general seem stronger than those on the sixteenth; the handling of the mid-Tudor humanists, reduced to obedience-mongers or lumped in among Elizabethan ‘conformists’, is weak. On the other hand, the style throughout is clear and straightforward, and the text is very clean of typographical or other errors. For the most part, the individual discussions of political texts are balanced, sensible and satisfying. A number of topics, some predictable, some less so, get particularly good treatments: Utopia; the supremacy; ‘casuistry’ as a recurrent phenomenon in political discourse under stress; Jacobean interactions of divine right and the ancient constitution; the radicalising of thought over the 1640s; the 1640s radical understanding of liberty of conscience, ‘not necessarily “liberal”, in our terms’ (p. 287). There is relatively little reference in the text to views of and debates among current scholars, but these are well indicated in the notes at the end. The book does a solid job of making its readers acquainted with the numerous particular figures it discusses, even if one can imagine more contexts or connections that it might have supplied.