'Lives that Never Grow Old' is a wonderful series- edited by Richard Holmes - that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive. Zelide lived in her father's moated castle in Holland, like a fairytale princess in a tower. She was the clever, sexy, mercurial young Dutch blue-stocking with whom Boswell fell disastrously in love in 1764. The rest of Zelide's story was unknown until the brilliant young Boswell scholar Geoffrey Scott pieced it together from her intimate letters and essays. Subsequent affairs with a cynical cavalry officer, a celebrated but vacillating writer (aptly named Benjamin Constant), and a thoroughly reliable music master, took her eventually to another fairytale mansion in Switzerland. This tender, funny, faintly salacious portrait of a 'belle-esprit' is one of the most exquisite biographical miniatures ever written.

This volume advances scholarly understanding of English Catholicism in the early modern period through a series of interlocking essays on single family: the Throckmortons of Coughton Court, Warwickshire, whose experience over several centuries encapsulates key themes in the history of the Catholic gentry. Despite their persistent adherence to Catholicism, in no sense did the Throckmortons inhabit a 'recusant bubble'. Family members regularly played leading roles on the national political stage, from Sir George Throckmorton's resistance to the break with Rome in the 1530s, to Sir Robert George Throckmorton's election as the first English Catholic MP in 1831. Taking a long-term approach, the volume charts the strategies employed by various members of the family to allow them to remain politically active and socially influential within a solidly Protestant nation. In so doing, it contributes to ongoing attempts to integrate the study of Catholicism into the mainstream of English social and political history, transcending its traditional status as a 'special interest' category, remote from or subordinate to the central narratives of historical change. It will be particularly welcomed by historians of the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, who increasingly recognise the importance of both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism as central themes in English cultural and political life.

Court studies and Jacobitism have both received considerable attention from historians in recent years, yet so far no attempt has been made to provide a comprehensive examination of the Jacobite court in exile after the revolution of 1688-9. This book takes a completely fresh look at the Stuart court in France during the years when the Jacobite movement posed its greatest threat to the post-revolution governments in London. The Stuart court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is revealed as not only large and well financed, but also magnificently located in a spectacular royal palace vacated only recently by Louis XIV and in very close contact with the French court at Versailles - yet maintaining the traditions, organisation and ceremonial of the English court at Whitehall. The book also shows how the Stuart court in France came to an end, and explains why and how it has since been so badly misrepresented.

AUGUSTINE BAKER O.S.B. is arguably the most important English mystical teacher of the post-Reformation period. His output was prodigious, and his knowledge of the spiritual classics all-embracing. Most of his teachings, however, remained in manuscript and largely inaccessible. Now, thanks to the energy of Dr John Clark, nearly forty volumes of Baker's works have been edited and published over the last two decades, the hope being that all his extant treatises will eventually see publication. This present volume, which brings together the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines, is the only major study currently available to explore the rich complexity of Baker's thought.