of religion, and the incompatibility between Islam and liberalism, which runs parallel to what I'm saying in Mill and Liberalism". In 1992 Philip Williamson published his book on British politics from 1926 to 1932 and said Cowling "provided the original inspiration" for it. Later life and death Cowling retired from the History Faculty of Cambridge in 1988, and from his Fellowship of Peterhouse in 1993. He rarely returned to the university. In 1996, in Swansea, where he now lived, Cowling married George Gale's ex-wife Patricia, with whom he had long conducted an affair. On 24 August 2005, Cowling died at Singleton Hospital in Swansea after a long illness. The Politics of British Democracy Cowling wrote three books on British high politics, the sequence he called The Politics of British Democracy. Cowling wrote that "In the future there will be an introduction bearing the sequence-title which will deal in its widest aspects with the period from 1850 to 1940 and will assess the methods used in the volumes which have now been published". However this never appeared. Cowling wrote a letter to The Times Literary Supplement on 3 June 1977 arguing for the need for "a different emphasis" to that on high politics. The first of these was 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: the Passing of the Second Reform Bill, about the Reform Act 1867. This was published during its centenary and dedicated to "the Prime Minister", Labour leader Harold Wilson. Cowling challenged the traditional liberal assumptions over the reform crisis of the 1860s by arguing that the Liberal Party was not the straightforward progressive party that wanted to hand political power to the working-class and that the Conservatives did not promote reform in reaction to working-class pressure. Cowling instead placed much more importance on parliamentary manoeuvres. Robert Blake thought that this book "gives the most convincing account of what happened". In 1971 appeared The Impact of Labour, which dealt with the years between 1920, after Labour won the Spen Valley by-election, and 1924 when the Conservatives won the general election of that year and ended the Liberal Party as a realistic party of government, with the Labour Party emerging as the Opposition. In 1975 appeared The Impact of Hitler, dealing with 1933 to 1940. Cowling has been described as an "isolationist imperialist" who argued that from Britain's point of view the Second World War was a "liberal war which had