The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu: Scientist and Feminist, Jo Willett, Pen and Sword, 2021, 256p, £25-00. ISBN 9781526779380 Mary Wortley Montagu was baptised on 26 May 1689 and died on 21 August 1762 in London. From a wealthy aristocratic family, she had great intellectual curiosity and the opportunities...

The Pirate World: A History of the Most Notorious Sea Robbers, Angus Konstam, Osprey Publishing, 2019, 336p, £25-00. ISBN 976-1-4728-3097-5 Angus Konstam very successfully blends a narrative of how piracy has been a challenge to settled society for at least two thousand years with some very important insights. He explains...

The Poisoned Well: Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East, Roger Hardy, Hurst and Company, London, paperback, 2018, ISBN 9781849049542. Roger Hardy worked for more than twenty years as a Middle East analyst with the BBC World service. In this book he ‘unearths an imperial history stretching from North Africa...

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...

Vincent Morley (Cork University Press), 2017, 362pp., €39 hard, ISBN 978-1-78205-208-1. This book is a study of the Irish popular mind between the late-seventeenth and the early-nineteenth century. It examines the collective assumptions, aspirations, fears, resentments and prejudices of the common people as they are revealed in their vernacular literature....

The Private Life of Edward IV, John Ashdown-Hill, Amberley Publishing, 2016, 336pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4456-5245-0. Dr John Ashdown-Hill, a central figure in the Looking for Richard Project and a renowned Richard III historian with a special talent for getting behind the mythology of history, now turns his attention to Richard’s...

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain, Tristram Hunt, Allen Lane, 2021, 323pp., £25. ISBN 978-0-24128-789-7.  As MP for Stoke-on-Trent, Tristram Hunt was prominent in the 2014 fight to save the Wedgwood Museum at Barlaston and prevent its contents going to auction. As director of the Victoria...

The Reckoning – The Defeat of Army Group South, 1944, Prit Buttar, Osprey Publishing, 2020, £30, 496 pages, ISBN HB 978-1-4728-3791-2 This is the ninth of Prit Buttar’s non-fiction books about conflict on Germany’s Eastern Front in the First and Second World wars, several of which Trevor James and I...

The Reformation in 100 Facts, Dr Kathleen Chater, Amberley, 2016, paperback, £7.99, 192 pp, ISBN 9781445651347 The year 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s dramatic nailing of his 95 theses on indulgences denying the pope’s right to forgive sins on the church door at Wittenberg, which in itself...

Gideon Brough (I.B. Tauris), 2017, 313pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-1-78453-593-3. Owain Glyn Dwr is a towering figure in Welsh history and military history. Initially a loyal subject of the king of England, he reluctantly took up arms against the Crown he had served leading the last war of Welsh independence...

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,...

The Secret Queen. Eleanor Talbot The Woman who put Richard III on the Throne, John Ashdown-Hill, The History Press, Stroud, 2016, paper, £9.99 ISBN 9780750968461 This revised edition of a book first published in 2009 and reissued in 2010, with an advertising alert on the front cover promising ‘New Evidence...

The Spies of Winter: the GCHQ Codebreakers who fought the Cold War, Sinclair McKay, Aurum Press, 2017, 346p, £9-99. ISBN 978-1-78131-298-8. For anyone interested in the wartime exploits and achievements of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, this will be a compelling sequel. What Sinclair McKay offers is an exploration of...

The Trouble with Tea. The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy, Jane T. Merritt, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2017, paperback, 212 pp., £17.00, ISBN 9781421421537 No event in the American Revolution is perhaps more vividly recalled than the Boston tea party - to the extent that, as...

The Tudor Kitchen. What the Tudors Ate and Drank, Terry Breverton, Amberley Publishing, 2015, hardback, 352 pp., £20.00, ISBN 9781445648743 Henry VIII’s most characteristic pose at the banquet table in so many screen representations of his reign is hungrily gnawing at a chicken leg before casting the bone casually over...

The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 192 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688100; Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 294 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688124; Women in the 1920s, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 256 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688117 Amberley are to be...

The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Ronald Hutton, Yale University Press, 2017, 360pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-22904-2 Why have societies across the globe feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs and origins in Europe's and global history.  Witches came to prominence –...

The Witches: Salem, 1692, a History by Stacy Schiff (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 2015 496pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4766-0224-2 The early 1690s were years of considerable anxiety in the New England colonies that were faced with spectral threats and actual threats from Native Americans and from without by a resurgent English...

This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe, Robert Tombs, Allen Lane, 2021, 203 pp, £16.99. ISBN 978-0-241-48038-0  Robert Tombs is well-known for his works on French and English history and he has turned his hand to an admirably concise history of Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours from the...

Thomas Chippendale, Adam Bowett and James Lomax, Shire Publications, 2021, 64p, £8-99. ISBN 978-1-78442-477-0. Thomas Chippendale has a claim to be Britain’s most famous furniture designer and manufacturer. Although we will have seen examples of his exquisite work in country houses and museums, we will not necessarily know very much...