Noel Malcolm's book consists of six stage-setting chapters, Hobbes's English translation of a manuscript version of a pamphlet written in Latin during the Thirty Years' War, and the Latin text of the published version. Malcolm's chapters are a tour de force of scholarship...Malcolm's careful, erudite edition of the translation and his discussion of the minutiae of the Thirty Years' War must be lauded. A. P. Martinich, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews This book...offers what good history should: the recovery of the past, in all of its forgotten complexity and detail. In a day when most academic writing achieves only clever hermeneutics, reading Noel Malcolm is a bracing pleasure. Times Literary Supplement