Copleston's 9-volume A History of Philosophy has universal acclaim as the best history of philosophy in English. Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit, knew that seminary students familiarity with most of history's great thinkers was reduced to simplistic caricatures. Copleston set out to redress the wrong by writing a complete history of Western philosophy, one crackling with incident and intellectual excitement and one that gives full place to each thinker, presenting his thought in a beautifully rounded manner and showing his links to those who went before and to those who came after him. Volume 5 is the British philosophers from Hobbes to Hume.
