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...

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...

Elfrida: The First Crowned Queen of England by Elizabeth Norton (Amberley Publishing), 2013, 2014 - 19pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4456-3765-5 The role played by elite women in Anglo-Saxon England and their influence in both politics and religion is now widely recognised. Elfrida is perhaps the most powerful and notorious of...

Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War, Dana Greene, Oxford University Press, 2018, 258p, £25-00. ISBN 978-0-19-882084-0. This biography contains much detail on Elizabeth Jennings’ life and poetry. Jennings (1926-2001), born into a Roman Catholic family in Oxford, was often depressed, guilt-ridden, needy and lonely. However, for long periods of her life she...

England’s Saintly Landscape, Trevor James, Lichfield Press, 2020, 95 pp, £10-00. ISBN 978-0-905985-94-7 The author is quick to credit W G Hoskins and Eilert Ekwall and their influence is readily apparent in the enthusiasm that permeates this study. Trevor James’ contention is that church dedications, place names, pilgrimage routes, local industries, fairs and...

Exclusionary Empire: English Liberties Overseas 1600-1900 by Jack P. Greene, (ed.)(Cambridge University Press), 2009  305pp., £16.99 paper, 978-0-521-13270-1The development of a comparative approach to British imperial history has been an important development in historiography over the past five years.  This was especially evident in the recently published Replenishing the Earth...

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...

Europe’s 100 Best Cathedrals, Simon Jenkins, Penguin Books Ltd, 2021, 360pp., £30, ISBN: 978-0-241452-63-9. Ever leafed through one of the visitor books found in many of our churches and read the comments? ‘Very peaceful’, ‘Lovely’, ‘Beautiful’, and similar well-meaning but bland observations are typical. Coming up with something more meaningful isn’t...

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...

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...

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 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...