Noel Malcolm is a General Editor of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. He has been a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, Foreign Editor of The Spectator, and political columnist of the Daily Telegraph. He left journalism in 1995 in order to concentrate on scholarly research and writing. Since then he has been a Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, and Carlyle Lecturer at Oxford University. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.

• Preface ; A Note on Dates and Transcriptions ; 1. Hobbes's Early Career ; 2. The Translation: Authorship, Date, and Style ; 3. The 'Secretissima instructio' Texts ; 4. The Distribution of the Altera secretissima instructio in England ; 5. Palatine Politics: Cavendish, Mansfield, and Hobbes ; 6. 'Reason of State' and Hobbes ; Hobbes's translation of Altera secretissima instructio ; Altera secretissima instructio ; List of Manuscripts ; Bibliography

The bringing to light of a previously-unknown work by a major writer or thinker is always a cause of excitement, and even more so when the author in question is a figure of the stature of Hobbes. Noel Malcolm's discovery amongst the papers of the first Earl of Newcastle of an imcomplete manuscript translation, unmistakably in Hobbes' handwriting, of an inflammatory European political pamphlet of the 1620s, is thus a tantalising and provocative event...Most professional scholars...will close this slim volume with mingled emotions of admiration and despair: admiration at the reach, precision and judgement of Malcolm's scholarship, despair over whether they could themselves emulate it.