'Topics in the History of Russian' emerges from an attempt to write short answers to university examination questions on the history of the Russian language. It has built up from that to become as up-to- date and comprehensive as achievable, but remains essentially a brief presentation of information on about forty broad and less broad topics in the general, phonological, morphological, and dialectal history of the Russian language. These are rounded off by appendices on the sounds of Russian, on the forms of Russian, and on the character and structure of Old Church Slavonic, not to mention a wide-ranging bibliography. The whole complements the author's 'A History of the Russian Language and its Speakers', Lincom, 2007.