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continuing construction of a truly national community, consciousness and institutional framework for political life. More specifically, the painting of the portrait is weakest when it deals with the vexed question of partition, and the role of Nehru and Congress in this violent disruption of Indian life in 1947. Recent research on the limited popularity of the Muslim League and Jinnah's probable use of Pakistan as a counter to achieve Muslim status within a pan-Indian union suggests that Nehru and his colleagues were not so much those whose vision of a United India was shattered by religious 'communalism' but those who chose outright partition in order to ensure a strong unitary state capable of the economic and social change they envisaged. Inevitably, English-speakers in the 1990s will be intrigued by the apparent contradiction between Nehru the democrat and Nehru the father and grandfather of subsequent Indian prime ministers. Yet he was not the conscious founder of a ruling dynasty, grooming his daughter for succession, as Judd seems to suggest. He was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Sastri, whose unexpected and sudden death so soon profoundly changed the balance in the Congress and subsequently brought Indira Gandhi to power. One must not confuse her aspirations and political style with her father's. India's contemporary dilemmas, the very questioning of India as a secular state amid unprecedented violence in the 1990s, underlies the magnitude of Nehru's vision of India and his role in its formation. To this achievement Judd's portrait is eloquent and judicious testimony. JUDITH M. BROWN Balliol College, Oxford A HISTORY OF MONMOUTHSHIRE, VOLUME V, THE HUNDRED OF NEWPORT. SIR JOSEPH BRADNEY. Edited from Bradney's MSS by Madeleine Grey. South Wales Record Society and The National Library of Wales, 1993. Pp. 207 £ 22.95. For those who like loose ends neatly tied up, it is fitting that this volume of A History of Monmouthshire has appeared exactly ninety years after the publication of a prospectus informing potential subscribers of J. A. Bradney Esq. of Tal-y-coed Court's forthcoming history in six parts, 'each part comprising one of the hundreds of the county'. It was thirty years later in 1933, the year of Bradney's death, that the (then) last part, The Hundred of Caldicot, was published. As the editor of the present volume explains in her introduction, it was always assumed that Bradney's life's work had remained unfinished, but it was not until recently that a draft of the final volume was identified amongst his papers at the National Library of Wales, together with notes (some dated as early as 1909) from which this book has been compiled. Joseph Alfred Bradney, landowner, J.P., and county councillor, was the son of the rector of Greet in Shropshire. Having inherited a farm in the parish of Llanfihangel Ystum Llywern in eastern Monmouthshire in 1868, he later purchased the Llanfihangel Estate, learnt Welsh and began the exhaustive task of compiling a history of his