Hingley investigates this ‘recovery’ through four main themes traced throughout his time-scale. He concentrates on bringing the natives to civility, separating the civilised from the barbarians by building walls, examining the fertile difference of the lowland zone from the less hospitable highland or military zone, and the bringing of Britain into the Roman Empire as compared with the bringing of India into the British Empire. I write ‘recovery’ because this involves an implicit viewpoint, perhaps even a whole philosophy, which needs to be made explicit. His end-date of 1906 — which I failed to understand till reading p. 314 — is the publication of Haverfield's Romanisation of Britain, which means that he avoids most recent research. This in turn suggests that his aim is to show what people in the past thought about Roman Britain in order to construct a sequence of understanding set against their contemporary themes and anxieties without apportioning praise or blame. For much of the time he sticks to his aim. I found most new material in the sections dealing with the period 1560–c. 1780, I most enjoyed the sections from 1780 to 1850, and I got most annoyed with the ridiculous fantasies of the Victorians.

Those (to me) ridiculous fantasies lead us back to ‘recovery’. I may be making too much of the word but to me it strongly suggests that there is a moderately objective picture out there which can be recovered by careful research, excavation and study; that the study of the past is a linear journey to an achievable goal unlikely to be falsified. On this basis this book is a thorough, intricately footnoted account of that journey between certain years. If the sequel were to be written and published, the next stage of the linear journey would be on record ready for the final push. My reading is different. While the journey may not be circular, and perhaps not vicious, I certainly see it as, at best, a tightly-wound spiral. So fashions change, ideas come back round into fashion from time to time, and research and excavation simply situate those fashions in a better-informed background. H. gives excellent documentation for some of these cycles.

Early workers had no doubts that Britain between Caesar and Claudius was closely linked to Rome even to the extent of education, coinage and perhaps client kingship. The idea went out of fashion to such an extent that John Creighton's excellent work, ideas and evidence (Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain (2000)) came as a major surprise to many. The military obsession is another example which the author documents well. At first there were the military monuments, then civilian monuments were discovered, Jacobite excitements dimmed, and the soldiers receded into the background. With the nineteenth-century concentration on inscriptions and troubles in British India the soldiers came back and proved very hard to dislodge through two world wars until the end of the twentieth century.

The Chichester inscription and the Silchester church are matters which are dealt with less surely than most others. I had forgotten that the inscription had been read and interpreted in two different ways at its discovery. Reading this section, I assumed that the Rex et Legatus was a nasty nineteenth-century perversion of a good solid eighteenth-century Rex Mag reading. I had to go back to Bogaers' detailed article (Britannia 10 (1979), 243–54), which is in H.'s bibliography, to sort matters out. The church is one of the occasions on which he deserts his own rules. In 1906 the Silchester building was firmly a church. He adds a recent article which doubts this, but it is odd to quote one post-1906 article out of many without even mentioning Richmond's re-excavation and Frere's publication.

Progress might be an appropriate note on which to end. By his open-ended approach H. denies himself the possibility of talking about progress in the understanding of Roman Britain and this is a thoroughly good thing. A change of understanding or theory cannot be judged as progress until we know whether it will turn out to be right or wrong, falsifiable or as yet unfalsified. In the same way many of the trends that he documents so well are left hanging in the air when we know from our own reading of later work that they were dead ends. I hope he does write the sequel — but it will be even harder work to produce an equally fair and balanced account of Roman Britain after 1906.