It has been a decade since I wrote the text of the first edition of this book, and I am happy to accept the invitation of Cambridge University Press to produce a revised and updated edition. I wish to thank all those readers and reviewers who took the time to point out several minor errors of fact or interpretation in the first edition, especially Hilmar Pabel and Mark Greengrass, and I have silently corrected these errors in this new edition. Because so much new work has also been published in the last decade, I have also taken the opportunity of this new edition to update the text in order to incorporate much of this recent scholarship. In some cases this has resulted in the expansion of certain passages or the insertion of totally new passages. Finally, I have also rewritten the ‘Suggestions for further reading’. Although these revisions have not significantly altered my original approach or the principal argument of the book, they have, I hope, resulted in a more up-to-date and satisfying book.