China's Wars: Rousing the Dragon 1894-1949, Philip Jowett, Osprey, 2013, 408p, £25-00. ISBN 978-1-78200-407-3This is richly illustrated and a work of meticulous detail. Anyone interested in the small detail of the various civil wars and invasions which beset China between 1894 and the moment that Mao Tse-tung secured Communist control...

Out of Birmingham: George Dixon (1820-98), Father of Free Education, James Dixon, Brewin Books, 2013, 264p [hardback and paperback].James Dixon is to be congratulated on the tenacity with which he pursued every scrap of evidence to produce this life of his ancestor, George Dixon.  From Yorkshire to Australasia, James has left...

T. M. Charles-Edwards - Wales and the Britons 350-1064 (The History of Wales, Oxford University Press), 2013 795pp., £95, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-821731-2 This is the first volume of the highly regarded History of Wales series and provides a detailed history of Wales in the centuries during which it emerged out...

Tom Scott - The City-State in Europe, 1000-1600: Hinterland, Territory, Region(Oxford University Press), 2012382pp., £45, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-927460-4There has been no detailed comparison of the development of the city-state in medieval Europe over the last century. There has been a considerable research on medieval urbanisation but it has concentrated on...

Coventry and Warwickshire 1914-1919: Local Aspects of the Great War, Vol.1, [ed] Chris Holland, Warwickshire Great War Publications, 2012, 146p, £9-95. ISBN 978-0-9574216-1-5. Obtainable from Chris Holland, Plott Bungalow, Plott lane, Stretton on Dunsmore, Rugby CV23 9HR. This is the first volume, with at least one more to follow. It...

Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625-1642, Richard Cust, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 350 pp., £65.00, ISBN 978-1-107-00990-5An innovative and important study that emphasises Charles I's conservatism in conceiving of the aristocracy as the principal support of royal authority. Cust suggests that this policy worked, as it provided Charles with the...

Secret Weapons - Death Rays, Doodlebugs and Churchill's Golden Goose, Brian J Ford,  Osprey Publishing, 2013, 280 p, ISBN 978-1-78096-721-9, £9.99.In this paperback Professor Ford covers much of the ground of Secret Weapons: Technology, Science and the Race to Win World War II published by Osprey in 2011.  As such...

The Norman Conquest, Marc Morris, Windmill Books, 2013, 440 p.  Paperback £8.99. ISBN: 9780099537441 Marc Morris will be known to many from his appearances as a television historian and he was a very popular lecturer the recent Historical Association Conference at York. He been the main presenter on Castle but,...

Whitaker's Britain, Bloomsbury, 2013, 186p, £9-99 hardback, ISBN 9781472903051Whitaker's Britain a selection of edited highlights from the one hundred and forty five editions of Whitaker's Almanac, since it was launched by Joseph Whitaker in 1868. Each extract is accompanied by helpful commentary.A local or contemporary historian could, however, use this...

The First World War: The War to End All Wars, Peter Simkins, Geoffrey Jukes & Michael Hickey, 2013, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, 364 p. £25.00. ISBN: 978-1-78200-280-2.With the forthcoming Centenary of World War I there will be many books about its course. The authors have produced a detailed and well-researched account...

Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (Allen Lane, 2013), pp. 690This book returns to territory which Simms' first explored in The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779 - 1890. Like its predecessor, it owes much to the tradition of international history advanced by the likes...

The Borough of Maldon 1688-1800: a Golden Age, J. R. Smith, Brewin Books, 2013, 532p [97 illustrations, 5 maps and 18 tables], £35-00. ISBN 978-1-85858-513-0.This is a work of meticulous scholarship, as one might expect from someone who studied under the painstaking scholarship of Professors Alan Everitt and Charles Phythian-Adams...

David Baldwin - (Amberley Press), 2013272 pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4456-1591-2Interest in Richard III has recently peaked with the discovery of his skeleton in a Leicester car park, something David Baldwin had predicted twenty-seven years ago and he includes a chapter on the discovery in this well-written book.   For someone...

The Complete Pompeii - Joanne Berry(Thames & Hudson), 2013  256 pp., £14.95 pp., ISBN 978-0-500-290927Originally published in 2007, this paperback edition of Joanna Berry's authoritative and lucid account of the rise and fall of Pompeii has been published to coincide with the British Museum exhibition, Life and death: Pompeii and...

David Grummitt - (I.B. Tauris), 2013 212 pp., £12.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-84885-875-6 The Wars of the Roses from the first Battle of St. Albans in 1455 to the battle of Stoke in 1487 were one of the longest and savage periods of civil discord in English history.  What began as...

Cressy, David - (Oxford University Press), 2013237 pp., £16.99 hard, ISBN 978-0-19-969575-1Today, government is concerned by the question of fuel security (or rather insecurity) as access to gas resources moves away from the dwindling North Sea deposits to supplies brought in from across Europe.  This helps to explain why the...

Working Lives. The forgotten voices of Britain's post-war working class, David Hall, Bantam Press, 2012, hardback, pp. 391, £25.00 ISBN 9780593065327 This remarkable collection of oral testimonies drawn from hundreds of hours of first-hand interviews collected by an accomplished television producer and biographer of the steeplejack and industrial commentator Fred...

C. H. Lawrence - I.B. Tauris), 2013   245 pp., £22.50 paper, ISBN 978-1-78076-467-2 In the early-thirteenth century, the Church was in crisis challenged by a confident new secular culture associated with the expansion of towns, the rise of literature and development of new sciences, the creation of the first universities...

Resistance and Rebellion in the British Empire 1600-1980, Richard Brown, Clio Publishing, 2013, paperback, 626 pp., £27.95 ISBN 9780955698385 Susan England of Clio, in an unusual, but entirely appropriate, appreciation of the author by the publisher in a foreword to this final volume of Richard Brown's remarkable trilogy of studies...

Catherine Rider, Reaktion Books, 2012, hardback, 219 pp., £20.00 ISBN 9781780230351; Yorkshire Witches, Eileen Rennison, Amberley Publishing, 2012, paperback, 128 pp., £12.99 ISBN 9781445602929 Catherine Rider's study of the relationship between religion and the occult in medieval England complements the trailblazing work of Keith Thomas on the early modern era...