In the last two centuries Britain has experienced a revolution in higher education, with the number of students rising from a few hundred to several million. Yet the institutions that drove - and still drive - this change have been all but ignored by historians. Drawing on a decade's research, and based on work in dozens of archives, many of them used for the very first time, this is the first full-scale study of the civic universities - new institutions in the nineteenth century reflecting the growth of major Victorian cities in Britain, such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, York, and Durham - for more than 50 years. Tracing their story from the 1780s until the 2010s, it is an ambitious attempt to write the Redbrick revolution back into history. William Whyte argues that these institutions created a distinctive and influential conception of the university - something that was embodied in their architecture and expressed in the lives of their students and staff. It was this Redbrick model that would shape their successors founded in the twentieth century: ensuring that the normal university experience in Britain is a Redbrick one. Using a vast range of previously untapped sources, Redbrick is not just a new history, but a new sort of university history: one that seeks to rescue the social and architectural aspects of education from the disregard of previous scholars, and thus provide the richest possible account of university life. It will be of interest to students and scholars of modern British history, to anyone who has ever attended university, and to all those who want to understand how our higher education system has developed - and how it may evolve in the future.

While references to Robin Hood began to appear as early as the thirteenth century in legal records, the earliest surviving poems did not appear in manuscripts and early printed books until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Several fourteenth-century allusions in the works of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer suggest that the rymes of Robyn Hood were widely circulating by the 1370s, but, it is vital to note, none of these late fourteenth-century works survives. A better approach, Thomas H. Ohlgren argues, is to focus on what has actually survived rather than on what might have existed. As a result, the poems Robin Hood and the Monk and Robin Hood and the Potter, which survive in two different Cambridge manuscripts of the last third of the fifteenth century, and A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode, which was printed at least seven times in the sixteenth century, must receive pride of place in the canon because they have a physical reality as material artifacts - in short, they exist and provide valuable information about the places and times of their composition and dissemination.

Volume XV of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information, which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. Its contributions range widely geographically, chronologically, and in subject-matter. The volume is, as always, a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.

Celebrating 50 years since the University of Nottingham received its Charter in 1948, this is a scholarly critique of the architecture which symbolizes a modern civic university. From its genesis in an arguably Reptonian landscape, the University of Nottingham has grown to include a diverse building stock which reflects not only the aspirations of an ambitious university but also the pluralist state of 20th-century British architecture. This is a critical appraisal of the University's key buildings in a political and art-historical context.