Volume 30 Issue 2 February 1980

Bryan Little promotes the notion that a whole city may be considered as a single monument which both commemorates many phases of history and which has survived frorn one phase to the next.

In the century between the union of the Crowns in 1603 and the Parliaments in 1707, was Scotland a backward nation with no influence south of the border asks David Stevenson.

In 1951 Leopold III of Belgium was forced to abdicate after a disastrous reign in which his country was overrun by Germany and he himself taken prisoner. It was a tragedy very much of his own making argues James Marshall-Cornwall

In the second article of The Resurgence of Islam Dr. Leila Ahmed, an Egyptian scholar who has taught at the United Arab Emirates University, examines the Islamic past - that of the Prophet Muhammad and the first four 'right-guarded caliphs' - to which the leaders of the current resurgence in the Islamic world seek a return.

According to Lindsey A.J. Hughes, Peter the Great's programme of Westernisation was neither as unheralded nor such a break with the past as has sometimes been suggested.

With the increase in Irish immigration into Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, concern arose about the resurgence of Catholicism. Yet not all women in convents were helplessly detained there, as explains Walter L. Arnstein.

Far from being a recent development, student control was a factor in the early growth of the university as an institution argues Alan B. Cobban.

Thomas More is often thought of as a family man who died for his principles, not as a burner of books and heretics.

The two articles that follow provide the background to the resurgence that is sweeping the Islamic world from Morocco to Malaysia. In the first, Professor Enayat of the University of Tehran considers why there should be a resurgence of Islam at this particular point in time and whether it is different from those that have preceded it.