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Behemoth, or The Long Parliament is essential to any reader interested in the historical context of the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). In De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651), the great political philosopher had developed an analytical framework for discussing sedition, rebellion, and the breakdown of authority. Behemoth, completed around 1668 and not published until after Hobbe's death, represents the systematic application of this framework to the English Civil War. In his insightful and substantial Introduction, Stephen Holmes examines the major themes and implications of Behemoth in Hobbes's system of thought. Holmes notes that a fresh consideration of Behemoth dispels persistent misreadings of Hobbes, including the idea that man is motivated solely by a desire for self-preservation. Behemoth, which is cast as a series of dialogues between a teacher and his pupil, locates the principal cause of the Civil War less in economic interests than in the stubborn irrationality of key actors. It also shows more vividly than any of Hobbe's other works the importance of religion in his theories of human nature and behavior.

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

The New Scots, the men of the army the Scottish covenanters sent to Ireland, were the most formidable opponents of the Irish confederates for several crucial years in the 1640s, preventing them conquering all Ireland and destroying the Protestant plantation in Ulster. The greatest challenge to the power of the covenanters in Scotland at a time when they seemed invincible came from a largely Irish army, sent to Scotland by the confederates and commanded by the royalist marquis of Montrose. Thus the relations of Scotland and Ireland are clearly of great importance in understanding the complex 'War of the Three Kingdoms' and the interactions of the civil wars and revolutions of England, Scotland and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century. But though historians have studied Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish relations extensively, Scottish-Irish relations have been largely neglected. Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates attempts to fill this gap, and in doing so provides the first comprehensive study of the Scottish Army in Ireland.