The Dignity of Chartism: Essays by Dorothy ThompsonStephen Roberts (ed.) (Verso), 2015 xxx, 206pp, £14.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-78188-849-6The historian Dorothy Thompson, who died aged 87 in 2011, was best known for her writing on the social and cultural aspects of the nineteenth-century Chartist movement. The documents she edited in The...

Suffragettes. How Britain's women fought and died for the right to vote, Amberley, 2014, paperback, 192 pp.,£9.99 ISBN 1445633909 This readable, engaging, pocket-sized, introductory overview of the women's suffrage movement is extensively illustrated with images drawn from publisher's archive and author's collection, some of the most distinctive from record offices...

Erasmus Darwin and Evolution, Desmond King-Hele, Stuart Harris [3 Pingle Head, 171 Millhouses Lane, Sheffield S7 2HD], 2014, 212p, £8-00. ISBN 978-0-9542-1518-7 Desmond King-Hele is foremost amongst contemporary scholars who have explored the life, work and ideas of Erasmus Darwin. A substantial portion of this book is a basic introduction...

John Starling and Ivor Lee, No Labour, No Battle: Military Labour During the First World War, The History Press, 2009 (384pp, incl. 30pp of phtogrpahs; pbk, £19.99) You might wonder why I am telling you about this book.  There have been endless commemorations about WWI, but except for David Olusoga's...

Joan of Arc, Helen Castor, Faber and Faber,2014, 328p, £20-00 [ebook £12-99]. ISBN 978-0-571-284627. The full title of this work is Joan of Arc: A History and this guides the reader into an expectation that this is not just another biography of Joan of Arc. With the meticulous scholarship that...

Slavery and the British Country House, Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann, eds, English Heritage, 2013, hardback, ISBN 9781848020641. Since the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle hit the big screens in 2013 this timely, accessible and scholarly multi-authored volume by English Heritage, whose publication coincided with the year of the film's...

Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution - John A. Hargreaves and E. A. Hilary Haigh, (eds.) (University of Huddersfield), 2012 238pp., rrp £24 paper , ISBN 978-1-86218-107-6. The book is also available at £20 here... In Kirkheaton churchyard near Huddersfield there...

Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History - James M. Banner, Jr (Cambridge University Press, 2012) 267pp., £18.99 paper, ISBN 978-1107697287 Based on the author's more than fifty years as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is a book that both...

Concrete Hell - Urban warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq, Louis A DiMarco, Osprey Publishing, 2012, £20, 232 pages, ISBN 978-1-84908-792-6.Dr Louis DiMarco was a US Army officer for 24 years, retiring in 2005 as a Lieutenant Colonel.  He now teaches military history and urban warfare theory at the US Army...

Jonathan Michael Gray, ‘Oaths and the English Reformation' (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 272 ISBN: 978-1-107-01802-0 Price: £60.00 In this monograph, Jonathan Gray explores the significance of oaths and oath-theory in the implementation of the English Reformation. He argues that oaths were integral to the process of reform and that an analysis...

Mary Queen of Scots and her Escapes, A. E. MacRobert. 2012. 170pp. Melrose Books, Ely, Cambridgeshire,£10.99. ISBN: 978-1-907732-90-4.   A.E.MacRobert has been involved in the study of history all his life. He taught the subject for many years and has done a large amount of research in it. This is not...

E. H. Gombrich, ‘A Little History of the World', (Revd Ed., London, 2005), pp. 284.  ISBN: 978-0-300-14332-4 (paperback)Ernest Gombrich is best remembered as one of the most influential art historians and critics of the twentieth century. What is less well known is that at the age of twenty five (whilst...

Love, Tommy: Letters Home from the Great War to the Present Day, Andrew Roberts, Osprey Publishing, Oxford. 2012, 255pp. £20. ISBN: 978-1-84908-791-9. Andrew Roberts has already published award winning books with a military theme. Here, he tackles conflict in the 20th and 21st Centuries from the point of view of...

Pacts and Alliances in History. Diplomatic Strategy and the Politics of Coalitions, edited by Melissa P. Yeager and Charles Carter, I.B. Tauris, 2012, 295 pp., £59.95, ISBN 9781848857735A valuable collection on pacts and alliances, the building blocs of diplomacy and statecraft. Based on a conference held at the Mershon Center...

Offa: the quality of Mercia, Richard Stone, RSE Publishing, 2012, 34p, ISBN 978-0-9536-5273-0. £4-50. Available post-free from Richard Stone at 33 Arden Road, Barton-under-Needwood DE13 8LE, cheques made payable to ‘Richard Stone'. Offa was first and foremost king of Mercia [757-796] but he also had an undoubted national and international...

Great Discoveries in Medicine, edited by William and Helen Bynum, Thames and Hudson, 2011, hardback, 304 pp., £24.95, ISBN 9780500251805 One of the greatest and most enduring triumphs of the secondary Schools History Project has been the introduction of a thematic study of medicine through time. William and Helen Bynum's...

The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 192 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688100; Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 294 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688124; Women in the 1920s, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 256 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688117 Amberley are to be...

Scotland: A Concise History, Fitzroy Maclean and Magnus Linklater (Thames & Hudson, 2012, first published 1970, 4th edition) 260pp., paperback, £9.95, ISBN 978 0 500 28987 7 For this 4th edition of Fitzroy Maclean's definitive history of Scotland from early times to the 1990s, the assessments of Scotland's place in...

El Alamein: The Battle that Turned the Tide of the Second World War, Bryn Hammond, Osprey Publishing, 2012, 328 pp, ISBN 978-1-84908-640-0, £18.99. Bryn Hammond uses his scholarship and exhaustive research to make complex battles understandable. He has followed Cambrai 1917 with this very readable volume on the series of...

Famine, Fenians and Freedom 1840-1882, Richard Brown, Clio Publishing, Southampton, 2011, paperback, 581 pp., £27.95, ISBN 978095569878 Richard Brown's engagingly cryptic, alliterative title to this second volume of his rebellions and resistance trilogy inadequately conveys the extent and depth of his wide-ranging contextual analysis of this formative period of Irish...