George Monk - or Monck, as the name is spelled today - was one of the key figures in English political military and naval history, and the man single-handedly responsible for the Restoration of Charles II after the Civil War and Cromwell's rule. This adulatory biography - amounting at times to a hero-worshipping hagiography - is of great historical interest, being the first Life of the great man, written by someone who knew Monk almost too intimately: his personal physician, Thomas Skinner. (The General suffered from indifferent health, partly thanks to his hard soldiering, and died of oedema...