Books by Derek (William Eliot Smith Professor of History Hirst

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates Marvell and his writings within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid seventeenth-century England.

A rich narrative history of England's increasing dominance over the territories that became known as the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the reign of Henry VII through to the Act of Union of 1707.