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Reason and Commitment By Roger Trigg Cambridge University Press, 1973, 172 pp., £3.20 cloth, 95p paper

It seems true that personal letters and notes are very like conversation: what is written has life and meaning only in its situation. To understand personal letters is more like understanding an action than it is like deciphering a text. But of course it is a main part of a historian's business to understand actions. He has neither the special concern nor the special advantages of the correspondent or interlocutor. But he can in his own way attempt to reconstruct the context in which the words have meaning. This is a far, far harder thing to do than most biographers seem to suppose. If a human character is to be an object of contemplation it must surely be studied—faults and all—by reference to all the available data. How otherwise can we do justice to it as an achievement? Karl Britton