It is impossible to overstate the influence of Lishman's Organic Psychiatry on British psychiatry. It has evolved through four editions over more than 30 years to become the definitive UK textbook of both neuropsychiatry and organic psychiatry. In many ways, Lishman's viewed as a series forms a wonderful history of 20th-century neuropsychiatry. For example, reopening the first edition reveals an incredible pool of valuable information about seminal studies from the 1950s and 1960s which are nearly impossible to find on medical databases. Yet it is also fascinating to see the gaps in knowledge that existed at that time, for example dementia with Lewy bodies, HIV/AIDS, mitochondrial disorders and channelopathies. Even more fundamentally there has been a subtle evolution of concepts and terminology through the series with decreasing emphasis on personality characteristics associated with neurological disorders and malingering but a burgeoning of supporting evidence from neuroimaging and medical genetics.

This fourth edition, now labelled as a ‘a textbook of neuropsychiatry’, has converted Alwyn Lishman's single-author volume into one produced by five editors and 13 authors affiliated with the Maudsley Hospital or the Institute of Psychiatry in London. This approach has increased the book's already impressive breadth and depth of expertise. Most textbooks of this size take on encyclopaedia-like characteristics by allocating each topic to an expert in the field. Lishman's tries to maintain some continuity by allocating only main chapters to individual authors and also using much of the text from the previous edition. That said, many important areas have been completely redeveloped, especially outstanding sections on neuropsychological testing, head injury and dementias. Perhaps surprisingly there are sections on schizophrenia, a feature shared by the American textbooks of neuropsychiatry, but overall the coverage is still very much organic psychiatry, not just psychiatric aspects of neurological disease. This volume could therefore quite appropriately be considered to be ‘a textbook of liaison psychiatry’ or at the very least have broad appeal to liaison psychiatrists and old age psychiatrists.

My overall impression of the book is that the authors have done a remarkable job of bringing this classic text up to date. The style is quite different to, say, Moore's brilliant Textbook of Clinical Neuropsychiatry, ^{Reference Moore1} less encyclopaedic and more familiar. Although there are inevitably going to be limitations, in general these are fairly minor. I do have a gripe about the illustrations as these continue to be very sparse and plain (although there are 13 colour plates) and more seriously do not always give the correct credit to the original authors or copyright holders. There are also several indexing errors, for example of myasthenia gravis, chronic fatigue syndrome, or alcohol-related dementia. That said we have to look on this new publication as a marker of continued interest in this exciting field and congratulate the new editors and authors for preserving the essence of the original while bringing in much that is new.