George Holmes was a delegate of the Press until October 1992. He is the editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe (1988, OPB 1990) and the Oxford History of Medieval Europe (OPB 1992), and amongst his other books are The Florentine Enlightenment 1400-1450 (OUP PB 1992).

the volume is a tribute to the Academy's work of promoting research in the humanities In this work George Holmes ... has collected eleven gems from the British Academy's "Italian Lectures" and "Aspects of Art Lectures" series. It is an anthology that will impress the neophyte or general student of the period and edify and delight the expert. Joseph P. Byrne, West Georgia College, History, Spring 1995

• George Holmes: Introduction; C. M. Ady: Morals and Manners of the Quattrocento; George Holmes: Florence and the Great Schism; Bernard Ashmole: Cyriac of Ancona; Denys Hay: Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages; Cecil Grayson; Leon Battista Alberti and the Beginnings of Italian Grammar; Nicolai Rubinstein: Lorenzo de'Medici: The Formation of his Statecraft; Michael Mallett: Diplomacy and War in Later Fifteenth-Century Italy; D. M. Bueno de Mesquita: The Conscience of the Prince; John Shearman: The Vatican Stanze: Functions and Decoration; Johannes Wilde: The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel; Edgar Wind: Michelangelo's Prophets and Sibyls