He has specialised in 19th and 20th century British political and cultural history and has developed a later interest in the relationship between Britain and the Ottoman Empire.
[1] A revised version of Parry's PhD thesis, which had been supervised by Derek Beales, was published in 1986 as Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party 1867-1875.
[3] A review of this noted that Parry was from a similar school of thought as Maurice Cowling,[7] another Petrean don of whom he later wrote various posthumous accounts.
[8] The scholarly literature on British historiography includes Parry as a leader of the Cambridge school of modern politics, as shown by Alex Middleton in 2021.
Edited by Paul Readman and Geraint Thomas, the contributors included David Cannadine, Michael Bentley and Boyd Hilton.