Throwing light on the medieval female voice - 'Women's Writing in Middle English' part of the revised Longman Annotated Texts seriesPrice: 12.99 each Publisher: Longman The Middle Ages - a time of arbitrary royal power, a wealthy transnational Church, and religious controversy. Not a time, perhaps, we associate with the...

1016 and 1066. Why the Vikings caused the Norman Conquest, Martyn and Hannah Whittock, Robert Hale, 2016, paperback, 160 pp., £12.99, ISBN 9780719819193  Martyn Whittock, a secondary school history teacher (many of whose 42 history books I used in my own teaching), and Hannah Whittock, who read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at...

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...

24 Hours at Balaclava: 25 October 1854, Robert Kershaw, The History Press, 2019, 286p, £20-00. ISBN 9780750988889. Robert Kershaw’s review of what happened at Balaclava in October 1854 is part of an emerging genre of research. He has examined vast quantities of written sources which together give a strong sense...

30-Second Ancient Greece, Matthew Nicholls, (ed.), Ivy Press, Lewes, 2016, hardback, £14.99, ISBN 9781782403883 This compact, strikingly designed, authoritative text by a team of authors under the leadership of Dr Matthew Nicholls, an ancient historian based at the University of Reading, sets out to distil the essence of the history...

50 Finds from Staffordshire: Objects from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, Teresa Gilmore, Amberley, 2018, 96p, £14-99. ISBN 978-1-4456-7548-0. Teresa Gilmore’s book is valuable at three levels. Her 50 Finds from Staffordshire provides a very helpful insight into archaeological discoveries within Staffordshire, largely over the last ten years, all reported to...

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...

Free Parks for the People: A History of Birmingham's Municipal Parks 1844-1974, Carl Chinn, Brewin Books, 2012, 160p, paperback. ISBN 978-1-85858-495-9. £14-95.Even people who have strong affinity with Birmingham will find what Carl Chinn reveals in his ‘Free Parks for the People' to be an extraordinary story. That Birmingham is...

A History of Women in 100 Objects, Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas, The History Press, 2018, 350pp., £20 paper, ISBN 978-0-7509-6714-3 The history of the world has been told in objects and the past decade has seen a growing number of books. But what about the objects that tell the history of...

A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime and the Nigerian Civil War, Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 272p, £75-00. ISBN 978-1-108-84076-7. More than fifty years ago, a south-eastern portion of Nigeria attempted to break away and declared itself the Republic of Biafra. It is usually...

A Short History of the Russian Revolution, Geoffrey Swain, I.B. Tauris, 2017, hardback, 232 pp., £10.99, ISBN 9781780767932 This new interpretation of the events of 1917 by Geoffrey Swain, Honorary Professor Emeritus and former Alec Nove Chair in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, has been...

A Soldier of the Seventy-First, Joseph Sinclair, Frontline Books, 2010, 160 pp., £19.99Based on the 1831 issue, this is a work well known from the abridged 1975 edition published by Leo Cooper. Shorter than two pages, Stuart Reid's introduction does not offer much, which is unfortunate as he is a...

Anna Selby, ed., Thomas Allinson, A Victorian Guide to Healthy Living, Pen and Sword, 2009, hardback, 192 pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781844680764Dr Thomas Allinson was a healthy eating campaigner long before Jamie Oliver transformed school dinners in twenty-first century British schools. He founded the famous Allinson Bread firm in 1892 and...

A Year in the Life of Medieval England by Toni Mount (Amberley Publishing), 2016 373pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4456-5239-9 The medieval centuries are often associated with dynastic struggles, grisly wars and the formidable influence of the Church. But what about the everyday experience of the royal subjects and common people?...

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...

Alias Blind Larry. The Mostly True Memoir of James Laurence The Singing Convict, Rob Wills, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016, 366pp., $39.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-925333-11-4. Rob Wills maintains that most convict memoirs are saturated with piety and penitence. But this is not the case with James Laurence. Alias Blind Larry is a convict story, an...

All for Freedom: a True Story of Escape from the Nazis, D. T. Davies [with Ioan Wyn Evans], Gomer Press, 2016, 160 p, £9-99. ISBN 978 1785621680. After the Second World War, David Davies worked successfully in the electrical installation business for over forty years and also became prominent in...

An Imperial Crisis in British India: The Manipur Uprising of 1891 by Caroline Keen (I.B. Tauris, 2015) 214pp., £58, hard, ISBN 978-1-78453-103-4 In 1891 a major anti-British revolt erupted in the northeast Indian princely state of Manipur after a dangerously miscalculated attempt by the Government of India to assert its...

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...

Raffaele D'Amato Arms and Armour of the Imperial Roman Soldier from Marius to Commodus, 112 BC - AD 192 (Frontline Books), 2009xiv, 290pp., hardback, folio, £35, ISBN 978 1 84832 512 8.This, the first of three volumes, is without doubt a magnificent production.  As Professor Giorgio Ravegnani of Venice writes...