This book contains conference proceedings from the 1996 Durham Symposium on ‘Galois representations in arithmetic algebraic geometry’. The title was interpreted loosely and the symposium covered recent developments on the interface between algebraic number theory and arithmetic algebraic geometry. The book reflects this and contains a mixture of articles. Some are expositions of subjects which have received substantial recent attention, e.g. Erez on geometric trends in Galois module theory; Mazur on rational points on curves and varieties; Moonen on Shimura varieties in mixed characteristics; Rubin and Scholl on the work of Kato on the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture; and Schneider on rigid geometry. Others are research papers by authors such as Coleman and Mazur, Goncharov, Gross and Serre.