Peter Hunter Blair's The World of Bede was first published in 1970. At the time of its publication there had not been a monograph on Bede worthy of the name for over fifty years (the last being The Venerable Bede: His Life and Writings by G. F. Browne, published in London by SPCK in 1919), and the standard monograph on Bede was still Karl Werner's (by then outdated) Beda der ehrwürdige und seine Zeit (Vienna, 1881). The prospective student of Bede and his Northumbrian context could do no better in 1970 than to consult the collection of essays by various distinguished scholars edited by A. Hamilton Thompson and published by the Clarendon Press in 1935 under the title Bede, his Life, Times, and Writings. The appearance of Hunter Blair's book changed this situation immeasurably. It gave us the results of a lifetime's thinking and reading about Bede and Northumbria by an eminent Bedan scholar, distilled into a readable and engaging book, written in a style that is immediately accessible to the non-professional scholar and which carries the weight of its learning lightly and modestly — as in all Hunter Blair's scholarly publications — but which is supplied with ample documentation for those who would pursue its arguments.