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Samuel H. Beer, the distinguished authority on the theory and practice of British politics, died at the age of 97 on 7 April 2009. His achievement as a scholar, a highly revered teacher and a political activist are well known and widely acknowledged. He was the first foreigner to be honoured as a vice-president of the Political Studies Association and the first recipient of the Isaiah Berlin prize for Lifetime Achievement in Politics. In 2007 the Political Studies Association made a special presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in recognition of his long and distinguished contribution to the study of British politics. He was president of the British Politics Group whose annual award for the best dissertation was named after him. Honorary degrees were bestowed upon him by Harvard, Depauw and Drake Universities in the US and Sussex and Ulster in the UK. He was honoured at a seminar and dinner in the House of Lords on the occasion of his 90th birthday attended by politicians and journalists as well as academics. He did not let on until some time later that it was only his 89th birthday. A similar occasion organised by former colleagues and students in the US got the timing right.

The most striking feature of this important project is the excitement that the book is able to stimulate about the theoretical issues involved, about what has been achieved and about what remains to be done. Whether it is possible to describe a women's movement in China is almost beside the point for the ongoing project is so impressive.

CONSTITUTIONS, CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM AND CONSTITUTIONAL conflict are once again commanding attention. The celebrations of the bicentennial of the American constitution, the implementation of constitutional reform in Canada, the Labour government's programme for constitutional change in the United Kingdom, the seemingly intractable conflict in Northern Ireland, and transfers of sovereignty to the European Union from its constituent states, testify to this. Equally, if not more challenging, have been the upheavals in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and its reconstituted states, the 'third' wave of democratization across the developing world, the experiment in participatory constitutionalism in South Africa and the return of Hong Kong to China. Of the 179 countries that elect their governments out of a total of 192 countries in the world, 176 have codified constitutions. Constitutions, however, that are not fully mature or operative and are not based on the principles or drafted with the advice of those nations that have developed and entrenched their constitutions tend to be disregarded, or even dismissed. Moreover, writing a constitution is one exercise, implementing, and interpreting it is a far more complex and delicate undertaking. So how are social scientists to evaluate the process?