William Holland "took quiet possession" of the Vicarage and Parish Church of Over Stowey in September 1779. He was not to remain quiet for long, as these fascinating and entertaining diaries reveal!

This second volume of John Rule's major two-volume portrait of Georgian England is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of eighteenth-century society, incorporating the exciting new research findings of recent years. It deals in turn with the upper class, `middling sort' and lower orders; with popular education, religion and culture; with standards of living in town and country; and with crime, punishment and protest. The book, which is as rich and varied as the age it explores, ends with an assessment of continuity and change across the century.

2012 is the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, now widely used in the Church of England and throughout the Anglican Communion. Comfortable Words draws together some of the world’s leading liturgical scholars and historians who offer a comprehensive and accessible study of the Prayer Book and its impact on both Church and society over the last three and a half centuries.Comfortable Words includes new and original scholarship here about the use of the Book of Common Prayer at different periods during its life. It also sets out some key material on the background to the production of both the Tudor books and the seventeenth-century book itself.The book is aimed at scholars, students in theological colleges, courses and universities, but there is sufficient accessibility of style for it to be accessible to others who are interested in the Prayer Book more widely in the church and to intelligent lay people. The book is unique in the way that it studies the Prayer Book and looks at the impact of it, both on the Church and on English society.

First published in 1989, in Bel Mooney's Somerset she sets the tone of this delightfully personal account of her 'adopted county'. Brought up in Liverpool, she writes of Somerset with the rapture of the late convert, travelling through its towns and villages in all seasons, observing sights as various as the Minehead Raft Race or rare beakhead moulding at All Saints, Lullington; the mysterious Glastonbury Tor and the magnificence of Wells Cathedral. She begins with Exmoor, with Lorna Doone, prize sheep at the county show, St. Bueno, the smallest parish church in England, moving on to the Quantock Hills, dotted with Bronze Age barrows and cairns. She describes the vale of Taunton Deane with it's rich red soil, and Cadbury Hill and the Somerset lore of King Arthur. We learn of the flat sodden world of the Wetlands, the dramatic beauty of the Mendips - wild, windblown trees and the 'gruffy ground' of abandoned mines. We can envisage the mud of Stert Flats, visit Burnham-on-Sea and Weston-super-Mare - a little melancholy out of season - and the accommodating, quiet, green fields and watery sky of the Eastern edge of the county. Somerset writers such as Parson Woodeforde, Coleridge and T.S.Eliot are introduced; so are characters from history - Judge Jeffries and the doomed Duke of Monmouth. The book is designed to be read as a narrative, and covers the whole of the old county of Somerset, dismissing the boundry changes of 1974, and including, therefore, the elegant spa town of Bath. Bel Mooney's enticing observations, her thoughts, idiosyncracies and passions, will be shared and enjoyed by anyone who plans even to pass through one of Britain's most beautiful counties.

Charles Darwin's discovery of evolution by natural selection was the greatest scientific discovery of all time. The publication of his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, is normally taken as the point at which evolution erupted as an idea, radically altering how the Victorians saw themselves and others. This book tells a very different story. Darwin's discovery was part of a long process of negotiation between imagination, faith and knowledge which began long before 1859 and which continues to this day. Evolution and the Victorians provides historians with a survey of the thinkers and debates implicated in this process, from the late 18th century to the First World War. It sets the history of science in its social and cultural context. Incorporating text-boxes, illustrations and a glossary of specialist terms, it provides students with the background narrative and core concepts necessary to engage with specialist historians such as Adrian Desmond, Bernard Lightman and James Secord. Conlin skilfully synthesises material from a range of sources to show the ways in which the discovery of evolution was a collaborative enterprise pursued in all areas of Victorian society, including many that do not at first appear "scientific".

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