Ancestral Houses: The Lost Mansions of Wales, Paul White, Damian Walford Davies and Sian Melangell Dafydd, 2012, Gomer Press, 119p, ISBN 9781848513981, £19-99.This is not a conventional local history book: it contains a series of black and white photographs, taken by Paul White, from forty-three Welsh houses in various serious...

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain 1830-1918 by Richard Brown (Createspace), 2012  482pp., $25, paper, ISBN 978-1466449084 Besides research on primary sources, academics and scholars also have to reflect on available secondary sources, so as to publish syntheses meant at the general public. Richard Brown embarked on such an...

Tutbury: ‘A Castle Firmly Built' - Archaeological and historical investigations at Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire, Malcolm Hislop, Mark Kincey and Gareth Williams, Birmingham Archaeology Monograph Series 11 [BAR 546], 2011, Archaeopress,  293p,  ISBN 978-1-4073-0855-5, £55-00.This is the long-awaited report on the historical evidence that has emerged at Tutbury Castle and its...

Keith Lowe, Penguin Viking, 2012, 460p, ISBN 978-670-91746-4, £25-00.This is an extraordinarily well-researched example of a recent approach to historical investigation. Keith Lowe has examined the local evidence, using the reports, letters and recollections of people at that local level, to provide an exceptional insight into what happened to people...

The Human Kind, Alexander Baron, with an introduction by Sean Longden  (Black Spring Press, 2011) xvii, 160pp., paperback, £9.99, ISBN 978 0 948238 47 5This is a work of fiction, written as a series of short stories but it is based on the author's actual experience of war.  It tells...

Cinema: The Whole Story, ed. Philip Kemp (Thames & Hudson, 2011) 576pp., flexibound, £19.95, ISBN 978 0 500 289471 Sir Christopher Frayling describes film as the art form of the twentieth century.  This is a quite exceptional comprehensive study of the history of the cinema from the earliest days to...

The Boleyns: The Rise & Fall of a Tudor Family, David Loades (Amberley Publishing, Stroud, 2011) 304pp., hardback, £20.00, ISBN 978 1 4456 0304 9David Loades in 16 books has gained an enviable renown as the story teller of famous Tudors, especially Henry VIII.  The fall of Anne Boleyn and...

Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification, 1500 to the Present by Edward Higgs  (Continuum), 2011  286pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-1-4411-8203-6 Who we are is increasingly seen as an important issue in British politics and is an integral part of the increasingly pervasive and intrusive ‘information and security state'.  We...

The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights by Ben Griffin (Cambridge University Press), 2012   352pp., £60 hard, ISBN 978-1-107-01507-4 The last twenty years has seen a renaissance in the study of the struggle for women's rights in the nineteenth century but...

A Concise History of Russia by Paul Bushkovitch (Cambridge Concise Histories, Cambridge University Press), 2012  491pp., £19.99 paper, ISBN 978-0-521-54323-1This book is accessible to students and general readers and provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. The author emphasises the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian...

Jonathan Dewhurst: the Curtain Falls, Philip and Susan Taylor, Matador, 2011, ISBN 978-1848767-263. £12-00.In 2001 Philip and Susan Taylor published their Jonathan Dewhurst: The Lancashire Tragedian. In this work they introduced the life and work of Philip's distant relative, Jonathan Dewhurst, who had been an actor and manager of the...

The SAS in World War II - An Illustrated History, Gavin Mortimer.  Osprey Publishing, 2011, 256 pp, ISBN 978-1-84908-646-2, £20.With so much sensational literature being produced nowadays about Special Forces, it is good to find a book about the history of the Special Air Service (SAS) during World War 2,...

Edward III by Mark Ormrod (Yale English Monarchs, Yale University Press), 2011 721pp., £30, hard, ISBN 978-0-300-11910-7 With the publication of Edward III, the English Monarchs series now includes biographies of monarchs from Edward the Confessor to Mary Tudor (apart from Henry III and IV) and James II to George...

Aethelstan, The First King of England by Sarah Foot (Yale English Monarchs Series, Yale University Press), 2011 283pp., £30, hard, ISBN 978-0-300-12535-1 Most people remember King Alfred, if only because he is the only English monarch to be accorded the title ‘the Great' but far fewer people will have heard...

The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God by Michael Bentley(Cambridge University Press), 2011 381pp., £50, hard, ISBN 978-1-10700-397-2During the 1950s, the History establishment was dominated by the likes of Lewis Namier, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A.J.P. Taylor and Herbert Butterfield.  Apart from Taylor whose essays and many of...

David Paterson. 2011, Troubador Publishing, £12.95.Histories of old established schools are often very interesting and this book is certainly no exception. The author taught history at King Edward's, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, for over thirty years and has only recently retired from there. He, therefore, knows his subject very well and he...

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, David Wootton (Yale University Press, 2010, London and New Haven) xii, 328pp., hardback £25, ISBN 978 0 300 125 368This is a ground-breaking work by David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at York.  It provides convincing evidence that Galileo (1564-1642) was a Copernican earlier than...

Dunkirk to Belsen - John SadlerIn the closing days of the Second World War, men from 113 LAA Battalion RA, originally the 7th Battalion DLI, part of the British 8th Corp, were tasked with taking over an ‘internment camp' from the German Military. This ‘Internment camp' turned out to be...

Wellington's Peninsular War Generals and their Battles by T.A. Heathcote, Pen and Sword, 2010, hardback, 208 pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781848840614This new addition to T.A. Heathcote's series of collected naval and military biographies will be welcomed by military historians and by those whose interest in the exploits of those involved in...

1930s Britain by Robert Pearce, Shire Living Histories, 2010, paperback, 80 pp, £8.99, ISBN 9780747807797This slim, attractively produced and extensively illustrated paperback with numerous sepia and full colour illustrations offers a handy guide to how we worked, played and lived in the thirties, a decade sometimes morbidly characterised, as the...