The authors are highly respected professionals in the UK. It is a short, highly readable and well illustrated book on general and systematic pathology, approached from the point of view of what medical students need to know in order to understand the clinical work they will eventually be doing. Includes a great variety of self-assessment, to reinforce the messages and to test understanding - and to help students prepare for exams.

• Concise synoptic (not telegraphic text).
• Appropriate self-assessment material.
• Only covers core, so student knows the whole book is essential.
• Includes key objectives.
• Contains simple and memorable diagrams for reproduction in exams.
• Ideal for learning as well as examination review, specifically trying to stimulate the student into assessing his/her own knowledge.
• The books in the seies both complement other available major texts, but also contain enough material to stand in the own right.
• Provides examination practice.
• Part of co-ordinated series.

• Now general and systematic pathology combined in one volume.
• Further refinement to contents to reflect evolution of what is regarded as core knowledge.
  
• Major revision of self-assessment material to match change in style of examination (mainly more
• EMQ- and OSCE-style questions).
  
• New cover design.

Maggie Smith is so witty and commanding in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that you might forget the script paints Jean Brodie as an ultimately self-deluding spinster. Dame Maggie won the first of her two Oscars for playing a teacher in 1930s Edinburgh more in thrall to her romantic notions of art and beauty than the real world (she exalts the Mona Lisa and Mussolini with equal fervour), a cultivator of worshipping "Brodie Girls". Smith's expert playing makes many of the brogue-heavy Brodie-isms worth memorising ("She seeks to intimidate me by the use of quarter-hours") and raises the picture above its generally theatrical style. Real-life husband Robert Stephens plays Jean's married lover; Celia Johnson excels as the hostile headmistress; and Pamela Franklin is the deadpan whistle-blower within Miss Brodie's coven. The dippy music of Rod McKuen helps mark the movie as more of a reflection of the 1960s than the 30s. --Robert Horton