Romanticised as ruins, treated as relics of forgotten military campaigns or as mere lessons in architectural history, the castles of England and Wales have too rarely been examined as places in which real people lived. Fresh both in style and approach and richly illustrated, Michael Thompson's book aims now to redress the balance. Examining the rise of the castle from its European origins in the tenth century to c.1400, the author devotes particular attention to the domestic accommodation - colourfully adorned but often cold and claustrophobic - that castles offered their aristocratic inhabitants. The book closes with the castle at its zenith, reviewing the extravagant outburst of self-conscious construction that took place in the fourteenth century as display and appearance came for the first time to play as important a part as function in determining building design.

Extensively illustrated with photographs, plans and period engravings, Michael Thompson's book examines the decline of the castle as both fortification and seigneurial residence over the two and a half centuries that preceded the Civil War. In general, this was a period in which function played less and less part and display - even fantasy - ever more in the minds of castle builders. Although few new castles were built in England after 1400, the growing power of artillery and continuing warfare in Scotland and across the Channel in France continued to provide stimuli to fresh architectural development. Dr Thompson relates alterations in design to contemporary social changes and devotes particular attention to the rapid decline of Tudor times and to the massive destruction wrought by Parliamentary forces during the Civil War and Commonwealth. A concluding chapter examines the enticing quality the image of the castle has continued to hold over the intervening three centuries and examines some remarkable latterday examples of the genre, among them Burges' Castell Coch in Glamorgan and, in this century, Lutyens' Castle Drogo.

The study of radiation damage in solids generally has been stimulated by the technological demands of nuclear energy and space research. Professor Thompson's 1969 book discusses the basic atomic mechanisms which give rise to the main effects induced by radiation in metals, since it is in their relatively simple structures that the fundamental processes can be most easily identified. The first part of the book describes the nature of lattice defects in metal crystals. The presentation leads naturally into the discussion of radiation damage in the second part and recognises the important contribution that the study of irradiated metals has made to our general knowledge of defects. The wide coverage of this book includes developments in our understanding of collision cascades, of the clustering of point defects and the behaviour of impurities induced by irradiation.