This review appeared in Lochaber Life, November 2002:

Wallace Bruce is the pen name of Roy Bridge's Joe Smith. When Mr Smith was a college lecturer, he took a group of students to the USA as guests of Neil Armstrong, and then began his interest in the eighteenth-century American hero.

John Paul was a gardener's son in Scotland, went to sea as a cabin boy and quickly became a Merchant Navy captain. When he was twenty-eight he changed his name to Jones, following the killing of a mutineer off Tobago. He then made his way to Philadelphia and joined the infant American Navy, rising to the rank of Captain by the start of the War of Independence. As well as harassing British shipping, he became famous for leading his men in the raid on the UK mainland at Whitehaven.

The author described all this, Jones's promotion to Commodore, his responsibility for organising the new navy, and his later work for Russia, with admirable respect for the facts along with the ability to pull the reader into sharing Jones's life under sail and in battle.

A great deal of research has obviously been carried out, but Mr Smith still manages to carry the story along in a lively fashion.

From: Lochaber Life, November 2002, No. 121

John Phillips provides great insight into some of the most difficult prophetic and eschatological passages of the scriptures. I have never before read a work of such clarity that brings together many of the threads of prophesy running throughout the old and new testaments.

This is a must read for any christian looking to understand and be prepared for the events that will soon take place.

If you enjoy the thrill and horror, the excitement and the plot twists of the talented John Saul, then you should read this book. Not only is it intriguing and informative, but it gives you real insight to the man himself and where his inspiration comes from. The author, Paul Bail, has chosen a collection of Saul's work and has provided the reader with a real understanding of each selected novel. Not only is this book fascinating for Saul fans, it is a wonderfully written study for fans of the macabre.

Fr.Ashley has produced a well-documented and thoughtful book on the roles of men and women in the church, discussing what true justice is, what participation in the life and happenings of the Church really means, and defenses for the prohibition of women to the sacrament of Holy Orders. Clearly, he has taken this issue very seriously and has done considerbale research in the area. The bibliography alone is amazing. While the work presents the reader with familiar issues, he explores a few new dimensions and contributes what I feel to be a significant aspect of gender and participation in the Church, namely the subject of what it means to be an active, "participating" member of the Church as a man or woman and the necessity of maintaining fidelity and "justice" to God's plan for the Church. Very interesting and worthwhile!

The author is a master of print. His knowledge of the Vatican & the papacy is unsurpassed. It is as though he grew up in the Vatican.

This book definitively places the decline of the Catholic Faith in America where it belongs: on weak or dissenting bishops. Such bishops are no more than judas-goats leading other goats among the flock to the slaughter while the sheep of their flocks are stranded in the world without shepherds. It was gratifying to see the love on Msgr. Kelly's part for those who remain faithfully in Christ's Body - such love is all too scarce among the Church's leadership these days. Thank you, Father Kelly.

This book covers the structural anatomy with pin-point accuracy. Though this isn't really an anatomy book by title, by examining Prud'hon's structural techniques, one can easily see all of college's artistic anatomy classes in one of his graphics.

This book is yet another terrific volume in the Spirit Flyers Series. More than any of the preceeding books, it struck me as frighteningly possible. In that sense it was not a ceerful book, but it was good, in the truest and purest sense of the word.

"Learn Tennis in a Weekend" provides in one clear handbook a concentrated, highly structured program that shows the novice -- step by step, hour by hour, how tomaster the fundamental skills of tennis in one weekend. One the court, tennis training, get to grips, stance and control, basic ball sense, forehand stroke, backhand stroke, two-handed backhand, the serve, service return, forehand volley, backhand volley, lob defense, overhead smash, approach play, serve & volley, playing the game, playing doubles, advanced strokes.

This is it, folks -- the point at which classical and modern liberalism began to diverge. Everybody in either camp is indebted, in one way or another, to the great Thomas Hill Green. And sooner or later, everybody in either camp will have to come to terms with him.

Now, in my own not entirely humble opinion, Green's criticisms of other liberal theorists are well-founded and he himself has gotten the philosophical foundations just about exactly right. Basically, his claim is that (my paraphrase) the source of our rights against one another, as well as the source of the state itself, is our possession of an ideal common end in which the well-being of each of us is coherently included.

He develops this account very painstakingly, and one of the joys of reading it is watching him make sense of Rousseau's tortured notion of the "general will." By the time Green is through rescuing this doctrine from Rousseau, it becomes something altogether respectable: that (my paraphrase again) there is an overarching ideal end at which our actions aim, and it is that end which we _would_ have if all of our present aims were thoroughly modified and informed by reflective reason.

I say "_would_ have" with some reservations, since for Green (as for Bosanquet and Blanshard, who followed him here) there is a clear sense in which we _really_ have this ideal end. But this point takes us afield into Green's metaphysics, which are better covered in his _Prolegomena to Ethics_.

As I said, this volume marks the watershed between classical and modern liberalism. Green is often associated with the "modern" side of the divide, but today's reader will be surprised to see just how "classical liberal" Green was (in, e.g., his opposition to paternalistic government and in a good many other respects). Why, heck, there are passages that could have been lifted from David Conway's _Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal_.

It does seem, though, that in allowing a positive role for the governmental institutions of a geographically-demarcated State, he has started down the slippery slope to the modern welfare-warfare state. Like Hegel before him and like Bosanquet after him, Green usually means by "state," not the bureaucratic machinery of a territorial government, but the whole of society including _all_ of its "institutions of governance." But -- also like Hegel and Bosanquet -- he does not always keep these two things firmly distinguished, and at times he is clearly thinking specifically of the governmental institutions of a territorial nation-state rather than what some of us would call the "market."

He is also a bit unclear on the ground of "rights." W.D. Ross rightly takes him to task for this in _The Right and the Good_: Green writes on one page that we have _no_ rights until these are recognized by society, and then turns around and writes as though "society" is recognizing rights we _already_ have. To my mind Ross clearly has the better of the argument here, though the problem is not, I think, terribly hard to fix.

On the whole, then, it is probably no wonder that Green and his crowd set into motion -- whether inadvertently or otherwise -- a stream of "liberalism" that would eventually find a far, far larger role for the State than any that Green himself would have approved. But to my mind, these difficulties are removable excrescences, not the heart of his theory. (And it is also worth bearing in mind that Green provides moral grounds for _resisting_ the State: he acknowledges that no actual State is really ideal and, insofar as it falls short of the ideal, should be brought firmly into the service of our common end.)

The theory itself seems to me to be sound. In fact, despite the aforementioned disagreements and several others, I would nominate this volume as perhaps _the_ single greatest work on liberal political theory.

Again, at some point every "liberal" of any stripe will have to come to terms with Green's ideas (perhaps in highly mutated form). And if, with minor tweezing, Green's basic outlook is sound, it also -- suitably adjusted -- forms the proper basis for the classical-liberal commonwealth.

It therefore behooves classical liberals and libertarians to get the word directly from Green himself. Those other "liberals" aren't _entirely_ wrong.