Like all the books in the Oxford range, it contains a long and helpful introduction, and individual notes for each work here, which are very helpful for Leibniz. Leibniz has a tendency to write for his friends, and thus you'll find he often assumes you already know something about his system, making his works very difficult to get into. Reading the introduction first completely clears this difficulty away and allows you to fully grasp his ideas (he's not a particularly difficult thinker once you get into him).

In terms of the texts on offer here, they have included all of his most important short texts, like the Discourse, Monadology, New System and Principles. As well as this, they've included some correspondance and replies from Arnauld and Bayle which is interesting since it had a big influence on Leibniz - and the correspondance to Arnauld also forms an effective introduction to his thought. If you need to study Leibniz or you're just into philosophy, you can't do better than this.

In line with that last concept, how to verify beliefs, one of the ideas I took from this book is that we need to step aside from what we believe to be true, and wonder why nobody else has caught on, to see if it makes any sense to anybody else. How do you know that sugar is sweet, because it's sweet to you? Not all people find sugar to be sweet. How can we make our truth sensible to others? How can others help us to find the truth?

Dr. Sharma makes many references to three books in his study here, so I would recommend before starting this book to first make yourself acquainted with them. Those books are "A Buddhist Critique of the Christian Concept of God" by Gunapala Dharmasiri, "Philosophy of Religion" by John Hick, and "The Message of the Buddha" by K. N. Jayatilleke.

Please note: this is a scholarly book in the area of religious studies, if that wasn't obvious already.

I remarked in my review of that book that McTaggart's argument has been tried and found wanting, but one important partial exception is featured in this volume: D.H. Mellor's piece "The Unreality of Tense." Mellor does not, indeed, accept McTaggart's conclusion that time itself is "unreal," but he does take McTaggart to have provided a successful argument for a "tenseless" theory of time. (Mellor's piece is a revision of chapter 6 of his book _Real Time_ -- the first edition, I presume.)

The other essays range over a wide variety of topics, from David Lewis's "The Paradoxes of Time Travel" to Michael Dummet's "Bringing About The Past," from whether time really "passes" or not and whether the nature of time is a philosophical or an empirical question to whether time has a beginning and whether change is real. I shall not try to comment on them all.

But the selections are excellent and the collection as a whole is very thorough. In short, this a fine set of readings for anyone with time on his hands.

...Housman, Graves's biography tells us, wanted his books inexpensive so as to be widely available. Surely plasticated paper over boards in a perfect binding, no matter what the costs of storage and overhead may be, can't justify this steep a sum.

First, a few words to place my remarks in context. I'm not a historian (I'm an economist), but I've long enjoyed reading general histories. Indeed, I've read the entire 15-volume Oxford History of England, a series now being replaced by the New Oxford History of which, I believe, "A Polite and Commercial People" is the first volume.

Not being a specialist, I'm in no position to comment on whether or not Langford's book is representative of recent thought on the period. He'll sometimes set out a position with which he disagrees, and then explain his reasons for coming to a different conclusion. In these instances his may or may not be a minority view, but at least he has set out the opposing position with what seems like clarity and fairness. I'm not sure I'd want him to do much more in what is, after all, a book for the general reader.

The "general reader" of old was, of course, notoriously well-read, and at times Langford takes advantage of this assumption. I don't actually have the book handy just now and so can't check chapter and verse, but I think it helps if, for example, you've already heard of Maria Teresa. The author doesn't have time to explain, and a few times I found myself having to make an educated guess but, in 725 pages, this happened quite rarely (a tribute to the author's organisational skill, not to my own reading).

Traditional political history takes up only three chapters which Langford spreads throughout the book covering, respectively, from the accession of George II to the fall of Walpole, to the end of the Seven Years War, and to end of the American War of Independence. I've no idea how innovative or otherwise Langford was in choosing categories for his other chapters, but he manages to make concepts such as "politeness" interesting and coherent enough to serve as their themes. It strikes me that, when political history first began to fall out of favour, it was replaced by rather dull stuff that focussed excessively on, say, education or the poor law. Yes, these topics are dealt with thoroughly in Langford's book but, somehow, he manages to organise and interpret his material in such a way that it has all the narrative virtues we old-fashioned "general readers" used to like in those political histories. (I know that must sound naive to a historian, but these reviews are meant to be helpful to others who might share my failings. Another naive confession: I can't resist drawing a great many parallels between the period Langford describes and, on the other hand, our own times.)

Throughout, the author's style is elegant, varied and energetic without ever seeming affected in the slightest. It is direct, but capable of considerable nuance. I'm a surprisingly slow reader for a person who reads so much, but this really was [cliche alert] a page-turner [/cliche].

Now that I've finished it, I still might not be able to pass a pop quiz on the Gordon Riots, say, or the War of Jenkins Ear. Still, I've been entertained and--if I can put it like this--enlightened by this first volume in the new Oxford series. Bring on fourteen more!

In a perfect outline of the field, Minogue covers the history of political thought from the ancients throught the moderns, enticing one to know more about the rise western civilization, "how we got here," and why peaceful societies must cultivate the art of politics. He then moves on to foreign relations, analytical methods, and modern democratic functional topics.

One gem of concision concerns politics as ideology and the difference it makes, the topic of which professor Minogue is quite simply the authority. If this moves you, then pick up his classic "The Liberal Mind," newly reissued--or else for a serious education, "Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology." Whether you want to grasp the seductive thrall that enraptures ideologists from Eric J. Hobsbawm to John Gray, or from historic communism to today's Islamism, "Alien Powers" is an essential guide to unmasking all pretense of knowledge.

Bravo, professor! Thanks for a masterful primer.