Paul Slack is Principal of Linacre College, Oxford.

"...Paul Slack has produced a disturbing, as well as an exciting and important, book."--Times Literary Supplement

"[An] important book...[Slack's] work enriches our sense of the nature and ends of government, and complicates our understanding of the meaning of reform, and of its constituencies."--The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Keeping in mind Slack's top-down perspective, there is a lot to admire in his one-sided discussion of the problem of poverty in early modern England...[H]e does an excellent job of connecting particular moments of diagnostic rhetoric with a larger vision of social evolution."--Albion

"[A] well-argued framework for viewing the history of public welfare from 1500-1740. It ties together the detailed researches of many scholars and provides a unique synthesis. Intended for professional historians and graduate students, From Reformation to Improvement should become the starting place for any study of public welfare in early modern England."--History

"While rehearsing some of his previous research, Slack transcends it by offering a survey of public welfare policies that serious students will find a frequently stimulating guide to a perennially important and surprisingly interesting subject...It addition to its breadth, learning, and ambition, its perspective on the nature of the period is one of the most compelling reasons that Slack's book should find a place on early modern social history reading lists."--Joseph P. Ward, H-Net