This volume is presented as a ‘substantial’ updating of the previous edition published in 1995. The appearance since then of further volumes of the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire, of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and of ‘the enormous resources of the internet’, together with corrections from distinguished local historians, underpin this new edition. There are additional biographies of recent officeholders, and alongside Christine Peters’ ‘Historical Account’ of the shrievalty from her third edition (a welcome retention), there is a new introduction to the office of lord lieutenant from Hugo Brunner, who writes from personal experience, and an informative section on ‘The Modern High Sheriff in Oxfordshire’ from the co-editors.

Online resources have indeed mushroomed in the interval between editions. The freely accessible Wikipedia offers (at the time of writing) slightly different listings of the county’s lord lieutenants and sheriffs, with clickable links to biographies for most of the former and some of the latter. Details of other holders of these offices are also readily found on the ‘net’. In the context of widely expressed disquiet about inaccurate information located there, this volume thus had an opportunity to establish itself, in juxtaposition, as the authority on the subject, and to justify its price, by supplying the scholarly sources on which it is based. Unfortunately, these are largely absent. Cost and space considerations might reasonably have restricted references to a list of major sources consulted. However, beyond a handful of suggestions for ‘Further Reading’ in the introductions and an example in the preface of digitised resources consulted – the University College London record of slave ownership – even this compromise is not adopted. Indications in the biographies of the provenance of quotations are rare and usually vague. While ‘according to Fuller’ (p. 73) or an attribution to ‘Hearne’ (p. 132) might have been readily intelligible to readers of the nineteenth-century editions of The Lord Lieutenants …, these early chroniclers are less familiar now and their foibles potentially unknown. While the provenance of memorial inscriptions may be obvious, that of other sources reproduced at length is not.