At the end of Volume 3 of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Gibbon is in a reflective mood. It feels very much like he is intending on finishing his story here with the end of the Roman Empire in the West as a legal entity.  In fact I

  Hi, this is the History Books Review and I am Colin Sanders, currently engaged on mopping up operations.  We have seen that the last Roman emperor had been removed by Odoacer in Italy, and in this episode we follow the ramifications to Roman Gaul in Chapter 38 Part 1 of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall

George Bernard Shaw once said something along the lines that it is possible for a small and determined group of people to change the world.  And that in fact, this was the only thing that ever did change the world.  He was right, but that doesn’t take away from the courage and energy it requires

The Liberal Democrats have a heritage that comes from the nineteenth century Liberal Party, with its great legacy of reform and from the Labour Party, via the Social Democrat party.  They probably don’t get a lot of credit from current voters for the 1831 Great Reform Act, but its is not a bad thing to

I won’t be voting SNP for the very good reason that I am not Scottish and don’t live in Scotland.  For the same reason, I was tempted to leave the SNP out of this series.  But if the SNP win a lot of seats in Scotland and no other party gets a majority in the

No party in Britain has a more romantic history than the Labour Party.  It is a thread in British society that goes back to the Diggers and the Levellers of the Civil War, continues through the struggles of the Trade Unionists and the Chartists and in which the founding of a socialist party to represent