Cemeteries and Graveyards, Celia Heritage, Pen and Sword, 2022, 236p, £15.99. ISBN 978 1 52670 237 1. This is a most thorough and engaging book. Its focus is specifically the widest context of burials in England and Wales. As a handbook to be used by anyone wanting to understand burial...

Charles I & The People of England, David Cressy, Oxford University Press, 2017, 447pp. £14.99 paper, ISBN 978-0-19-870830-8 Originally published in 2015, this book is a blend of historical analysis and constitutional theory, parish politics and ecclesiology, military, cultural, and social history. Charles I and the People of England is the first major attempt...

Chartism: A Global History and other essays, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2016, 324 pp. £10.96, paper, ISBN 1534981438 This volume of essays written partly, the author reveals, as a response to a student enquiring in 2003 ‘What impact did Chartism have on the rest of the world brings the word...

Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2015, paperback, 408 pp., ISBN 9781517788988 J.M.W. Turner's romanticised depiction, completed in 1838, of vessels being unloaded in the Dee estuary with the first of Edward I's castles at Flint symbolising the eventual subjugation of medieval Wales by the English crown adorns the cover of the...

Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution by Jane Humphries(Studies in Economic History, Cambridge University Press), 2010 439pp., £60, hard, ISBN 978-0-521-84756-8In Kirkheaton churchyard near Huddersfield there is a 15 foot stone obelisk topped by a flame that commemorates ‘The dreadful fate of 17 children who fell unhappy...

Chinoiserie, Richard Hayman, Shire Publications, 2021, 64p., £8.99. ISBN 978-1-78442-464-0.  Chinoiserie describes the highly imaginative decorative style inspired by a fascination for oriental culture that emerged around 1650, peaked during the Rococo exuberance of the mid-18th century, before going out of fashion in the early-19th century. Motifs including pagodas, pavilions, flowers and...

Churchyards (Britain's Heritage series), Roger Bowdler, Amberley Publishing, 2019, 64p, £8-99. ISBN 9781445691114 This book is dedicated to the memory of Frederick Burgess, the author of English Churchyard Memorials (1963), from whom many of us learned to study and understand what we find in churchyards. This carefully developed study by...

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...

Clarke, Petit and St Mark’s: A 19th Century journey on the Isle of Man, Philip Modiano, RPS Publications, 2022, 44p., £9.00 [plus postage]. ISBN 9781916493117. Contact via enquiries@revpetit.com In this extraordinary booklet Philip Modiano explains the architectural and personal relationship built up between the notable water-colourist, the Revd John Louis Petit,...

Coffee: A Drink for the Devil by Paul Chrystal (Amberley Publishing), 2016 96pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4456-4939-2 In the Western world, coffee consumption is around one-third that of tap water and the poet T.S. Eliot commented that ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ After petroleum, coffee is...

Come Wind, Come Weather: Storm: Tempest and Other Natural Phenomena within Local Sources, Trevor James, Lichfield Press, 2021, 116p. £10-00.  ISBN 978-0-905985-62-6  What a pleasure it is to review a book by that arch-reviewer, Dr Trevor James. This book follows closely on his previous one, England’s Saintly Landscapes, and confirms...

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...

Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing, Molly Farrell, Oxford University Press, 2016, 280pp., £41.99, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-027731-4. Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so pervasive that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was no word for ‘population’ in the sense...

Crime on the Canals, Anthony Poulton-Smith, Pen and Sword, 2019, 120p, £12-99. ISBN 9781526754783. This interesting book is presented as an exposure of criminality on the canal system, and it does achieve that objective rather well. It has to be said that it is more about crime than canals, although...

D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story, by Giles Milton, London, John Murray, 2018, ISBN 978-1-473-4901-9. £25.00 Why one side wins, and another does not, is the key element in military history. That element is not well answered by focusing on the face of battle, the approach that is so often taken today....

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...

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...

Early Medieval Europe 300-1050: The Birth of Western Society David Rollason (Pearson), 2012 394pp., £22.99, paper, ISBN 978-1-4082-5121-8As a medievalist by training, I have always thought it unfortunate that medieval history does not figure above Key Stage 3 in the National Curriculum and has long since ceased to be a...

Early Medieval Kent 800-1220, Sheila Sweetinburgh (ed.) (Boydell Press Kent County Council), 2016 333pp., £50 hard, ISBN 978-0-85115-583-8. This is the tenth volume in the Kent History Project, supported by Kent County Council, that now covers the history of the county from the archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon period through to...

Edward II by Seymour Phillips (Yale English Monarchs, Yale University Press), 2010 679pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-15657-7Stuck between two of the greatest medieval English monarchs his father Edward I, the ‘Hammer of the Scots' and his son Edward III, it is hardly surprising that Edward II has gained the reputation...