A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610, R, Po-Chia Hsia (Oxford University Press, 2012, first published in hardback, 2010) xvi, 359pp., paperback, £40.00, ISBN 978 0 19 959225 8 (hardback), £19.99, ISBN 978 0 19 965653 0 (paperback)The author is known and respected as an expert on the...

London's Docklands: A History of the Lost Quarter, Fiona Rule (Ian Allen Publishing, Hersham, Surrey, first published 2009, this impression 2012, £8.99, 336pp., paperback ISBN 978 0 7110 3716 8 Two or three generations ago the London docks employed over 100,000 men and the area was dominated by the Port...

The Golden Horseshoe. The Wartime Career of Otto Kretschmer, U-Boat Ace, Frontline Books, 2011, paperback, 210 pp., £13.99 ISBN 9781848326149; The Rice Paddy Navy. U.S. Sailors Undercover in China, Linda Kush, Osprey Publishing, 2012, hardback, 294 pp., £20.00 ISBN 9781849088114; The S.A.S. in Tuscany 1943-45, Brian Lett, Pen and Sword...

The Boys of '67: Charlie Company's War in Vietnam,Andrew Wiest, 2012, Osprey Publishing, Oxford, 376 pp, £20.00.ISBN: 978-1-78096-202-3.  Andrew Wiest is a leading American military historian, who has published several works on the Vietnam War and World War I. He has lectured extensively both in the U.S.A. and Britain. This book...

Concrete Hell - Urban warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq, Louis A DiMarco, Osprey Publishing, 2012, £20, 232 pages, ISBN 978-1-84908-792-6.Dr Louis DiMarco was a US Army officer for 24 years, retiring in 2005 as a Lieutenant Colonel.  He now teaches military history and urban warfare theory at the US Army...

Jonathan Michael Gray, ‘Oaths and the English Reformation' (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 272 ISBN: 978-1-107-01802-0 Price: £60.00 In this monograph, Jonathan Gray explores the significance of oaths and oath-theory in the implementation of the English Reformation. He argues that oaths were integral to the process of reform and that an analysis...

Mary Queen of Scots and her Escapes, A. E. MacRobert. 2012. 170pp. Melrose Books, Ely, Cambridgeshire,£10.99. ISBN: 978-1-907732-90-4.   A.E.MacRobert has been involved in the study of history all his life. He taught the subject for many years and has done a large amount of research in it. This is not...

E. H. Gombrich, ‘A Little History of the World', (Revd Ed., London, 2005), pp. 284.  ISBN: 978-0-300-14332-4 (paperback)Ernest Gombrich is best remembered as one of the most influential art historians and critics of the twentieth century. What is less well known is that at the age of twenty five (whilst...

Love, Tommy: Letters Home from the Great War to the Present Day, Andrew Roberts, Osprey Publishing, Oxford. 2012, 255pp. £20. ISBN: 978-1-84908-791-9. Andrew Roberts has already published award winning books with a military theme. Here, he tackles conflict in the 20th and 21st Centuries from the point of view of...

Pacts and Alliances in History. Diplomatic Strategy and the Politics of Coalitions, edited by Melissa P. Yeager and Charles Carter, I.B. Tauris, 2012, 295 pp., £59.95, ISBN 9781848857735A valuable collection on pacts and alliances, the building blocs of diplomacy and statecraft. Based on a conference held at the Mershon Center...

Offa: the quality of Mercia, Richard Stone, RSE Publishing, 2012, 34p, ISBN 978-0-9536-5273-0. £4-50. Available post-free from Richard Stone at 33 Arden Road, Barton-under-Needwood DE13 8LE, cheques made payable to ‘Richard Stone'. Offa was first and foremost king of Mercia [757-796] but he also had an undoubted national and international...

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...

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...

Scotland: A Concise History, Fitzroy Maclean and Magnus Linklater (Thames & Hudson, 2012, first published 1970, 4th edition) 260pp., paperback, £9.95, ISBN 978 0 500 28987 7 For this 4th edition of Fitzroy Maclean's definitive history of Scotland from early times to the 1990s, the assessments of Scotland's place in...

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...

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...

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...

Olympic Visions; Images of the Games through History, Mike O'Mahony (Reaktion Books, London, 2012) 176pp., hardback, £22.00, 116 illustrations of which 50 are colour, ISBN 978 1 06189 910 1 The modern Olympic Games have become a world phenomenon since their beginning in 1896 and it has been a signal...

Britain's Secret War 1939-45, Michael Smith., Andre Deutsch, 2011, 64 pp plus removable documents of historical importance, ISBN 978-0-233-00337-5, £30. Michael Smith is one of the country's foremost writers on defence and intelligence and he has used his considerable experience to produce this gazetteer to British Intelligence in the Second...

Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, Richard Sugg, Routledge, 2011, paperback, £24.99 ISBN 9780415674171. Notwithstanding its box-office blockbuster-style title, this serious, chronologically wide-ranging study by a lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Durham identifies evidence of cannibalistic practices in...