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A historian's historian, F W Maitland was never to be caught indulging in fanciful speculation about times long past. Rather, he said, "We shall have to think away distinctions which seem to us as clear as the sunshine; we must think ourselves back into a twilight." To achieve this discipline, Maitland chose his tools of historical analysis with a lawyer's care. For example, to decipher works of medieval law written in Anglo-French patois, he became 'grammarian, orthographer, and phoneticist'. Thus did none other than Lord Acton declare Maitland to be 'the ablest historian in England'. In 1875, at only twenty-five years of age, Maitland, in pursuit of a fellowship in Cambridge University, submitted a remarkable work entitled 'A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality as Ideals of English Political History from the Time of Hobbes to the Time of Coleridge'.

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Within eight years of the death of George Washington in 1799, the first major biography of 'the father of his country' was written by John Marshall and published in five volumes. This, the twentieth and final version of the abridgement, published in 1849, is the text reproduced in the new Liberty Fund edition of what Charles A Beard has praised as a 'great' and 'masterly' biography. The editors' foreword and notes, together with maps of major battle campaigns not included in the original edition, make this edition especially attractive for students.

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Though Edmund Burke is usually identified as the first to articulate the principles of a modern conservative political tradition, he was actually preceded by a Scotsman who is better known for espousing a brilliant concept of scepticism. David Hume was undoubtedly the eighteenth-century British writer whose works were most widely known and acclaimed on the Continent during the later Enlightenment period. Hume's impact (in France) was of undeniable importance, greater even for a time than the related influence of Burke, although it represents a contribution to French counter-revolutionary thought which, unlike that of Burke, has been almost totally ignored by historians to this day.

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David Hume's great, enduring reputation in philosophy tends to obscure the fact that, among his contemporaries, his history of England was a more successful work. The history covers almost 1800 years. Hume saw English history as an evolution from a government of will to a government of law. Advanced in Hume's masterly prose, this argument continues to make the "History" a valuable study for the modern reader. This Liberty Fund edition is based on the edition of 1778, the last to contain corrections by Hume. The typography has been modernized for ease of reading. Hume's own index to the entire work may be found at the conclusion of volume VI.

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