Every student and every teacher knows the importance of the 'seminal article', which packs into a few pages more ideas than many books. In the field of European history, one such article was 'Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy', published in 1957 by Victor Kiernan. Professor Kiernan has many historical interests, and he moved on to The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History (1966), and The Lords of Human Kind (1969), a discussion of 19th-century European attitudes to the rest of the world.

LRB 5 March 1981 | PDF Download