Fair Seed-Time: Robert Evans, Francis Newdigate and the Making of George Eliot, David Paterson, Troubadour, 2019, 306p, £12-00. ISBN 978-1-83859-146-5 ‘Fair seed-time’ is a phrase used by William Wordsworth and echoed in a comment by George Eliot when she wrote ‘these hours were seed to all my after good’. Co-incidental...

Finland at War: The Continuation and Lapland Wars 1941-45,Vesa Nenye, with Peter Munter, Toni Wirtanen and Chris Birks.Osprey Publishing, 2016, 336p, £30.00, ISBN: 978-1-4728-1526-2 This volume explores Finland's part in World War II and is a continuation of the 2015 book on the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by the...

Folly and Malice: The Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and the Start of World War One, John Zametica, Shepheard-Walwyn, 2017, 766p, £27-95. ISBN 0856835137. This painstaking and meticulous piece of scholarship offers a challenge to some widely-held assumptions about the events which led up to the outbreak of World War One....

Frans Hals: The Male Portrait, Lelia Packer and Ashok Roy, The Wallace Collection, Philip Wilson Publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021, 130pp., £20. ISBN 978-1-78130-110-4.  The Wallace Collection, bequeathed to the nation in 1897, houses the art collection of the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, widely regarded...

Free Seats for All: The boom in church building after Waterloo, Gill Hedley, Umbria Press, 2018, 20p, £20-00, ISBN 978-1-910074-16-1 This is a welcome addition to our detailed understanding of the growth of Anglican church building in the 19th Century. It stands as a very helpful complement to M.H. Port’s Six Hundred...

From Democrats to Kings: The Downfall of Athens to the Epic Rise of Alexander the Great, Michael Scott (Icon Books 2010, previously published in 2009) xix, 294pp., paperback, £8.99, ISBN 978 1 84031 131 2This is the first book by Michael Scott, currently Moses and Mary Finley & Fellow of...

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...

Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction, David Wallace, Oxford University Press, 2017, 172pp., £10.99 hard, ISBN 978-0-19-880506-9 Originally writing over 600 years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer is today enjoying a global renaissance. Poets, translators and audiences from many cultures from Iran to the islands of Japan find Chaucer inspiring. His tale-telling geography is vast, his...

Georgian Dublin. The Forces that Shaped the City, Diarmuid O Grada, Cork University Press, 2015, hardback, 400 pp., £35.00, ISBN 9781782051473 Diarmuid O Grada, a planning consultant and occasional lecturer in planning at University College Dublin, offers a fresh perspective in this lively revisionist study which challenges traditional depictions of...

HA President Tony Badger examines the historical context which shapes our understanding of Margaret Mitchell’s enduring novel. I had been a historian of the American South for 50 years and like Ringbaum, I had a secret. I had never read Gone with the Wind. As I came up to retirement...

Great Victorian Discoveries. Astounding Revelations and Misguided Assumptions, Caroline Rochford, Amberley, 2015, paperback, 287 pp., £9.99, ISBN 9781445645421 This sequel to the author’s well-received Great Victorian Inventions presents a cornucopia of ‘brilliant and bizarre’ examples of Victorian quests for knowledge of a world, which they dominated in so many other...

Greek Secrets Revealed: Hidden Scottish History Uncovered Book 1 – Edinburgh, Ian McHaffie, self-published, 2022, 200p, £12-00 [including p+p]. ISBN 978-0-9546681-7-4. Copies can be ordered via mchaffie1@incloud.com Professor W. G. Hoskins once commented that one of the principal joys of local history was its inter-disciplinary nature. He could see how...

Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman who Shaped Modern Britain, John Campbell; Hurst and Company, 2020, 482p, £30-00. ISBN 9781787383111 From my years in the sixth form through being a student and teacher, I have referred to what is now a very battered copy of Alan Palmer’s Penguin Dictionary of Modern History. The...

Henry Matthews, Viscount Llandaff, The Unknown Home Secretary, Roger Ward, Fonthill Media, 2019, 96p, £16-99. ISBN 9781781557150. Despite Henry Matthews’ attempt to obstruct a biographical record of his life being prepared, by instructing his niece to burn all his private papers, Roger Ward offers us a well-composed and well-balanced assessment...

History of the Waterloo Campaign. The Classic Account of the Last Battle of the Napoleonic Wars, H.T. Siborne, Frontline Books, Barnsley, 2016, hardback, £25.00, pp. 584, ISBN 9781848329614 Military historians and a wider range of readers enticed by the blood and thunder exploits of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe in the...

History: An introduction to theory, method and practice Peter Claus and John Marriott (Pearson Education), 2012 461pp., £22.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4058-1254-2It is hardly surprising that the theory of history is a subject that many students try to avoid.  In my student days, you were expected to read Carr, Elton and...

Hitler's Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man in Vienna Brigitte Hamann (I.B. Tauris), 2010   482pp., £12.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-84885-277-8First published in 1999 and reissued with a short forward by Hans Mommsen, Brigitte Hamann considers the formative years that Hitler spent in Vienna as a means of trying...

Hitler’s British Isles: The Real Story of the Occupied Channel Islands, Duncan Barrett, Simon and Schuster, 2018, 413p, £20-00.  ISBN 978-1-4711-6637-2 Having just read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Bloomsbury 2008), this very interesting book has now extended considerably my understanding of the nature of the experiences of...

Holding the Line: The Naval Air Campaign in Korea, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, Osprey, 2021, 320p, £14-99. ISBN 9781472831736. This provides a very thorough introduction to how the politics behind military strategy operates in the United States. What we find, with extraordinary parallels with our own time, is that after the...

Hopes and Fears for the Future in Early Modern Sweden, 1500-1800, edited by Petri Karonen (Suomalaisen kirjallisauden Seura, Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki, 2009) 370pp., softback, £26.50, ISBN 978 952222 142 1Some fifteen scholars working in Sweden and Finland have contributed to this book under the editorship of Petri Karonen, Professor...