Being a Historian: An Introduction to the Professional World of History - James M. Banner, Jr (Cambridge University Press, 2012) 267pp., £18.99 paper, ISBN 978-1107697287 Based on the author's more than fifty years as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is a book that both...

Beleaguered and Besieged: A Year in a Place of Rocks, Hugh Gault, Gretton Books, 2021, 124p, £10-00. ISBN 978-1-999851-9-5 Long-standing contributor to The Historian Hugh Gault has developed a novel approach to the study of the siege of Mafeking. The novelty occurs in two forms. He has created a diary...

Blackout, Austerity and Pride. Life in the 1940s, Roger Atkinson, Roger Atkinson Publishing, Chester, 2015, hardback, 368 pp., £22.50, ISBN 97809933007 This illustrated memoir, recalled primarily ‘from actual experience’ relates how ‘an alert and intelligent boy, effectively orphaned at the age of 13’ set out ‘to gain a foothold in...

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918, Katja Hoyer, The History Press, 2021, 253 pp, £14.99, ISBN 978-0-7509-9622-8  This admirably concise book gives due weight to the whole of the period from 1871 to 1918 rather than glossing over the years between the Bismarck Chancellorship and the...

Boudica at Mancetter: The Latin, the Land, The Logistics, Margaret Hughes, Atherstone Civic Society, 2020, 256p, £10-00 [and £3-00 p + p]. ISBN 978-0-9551803-3-0. Enquiries to secretary@atherstonecivicsociety.co.uk One of the locational mysteries of the history of these islands is where exactly did Queen Boudica fight her final battle in AD...

Breaking the Habit: A Life of History, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2016, 175 pp., £7.13 paper, ISBN 9781530295234 In this retrospective but far from introspective, autobiographical memoir Richard Brown muses ‘on the nature of History in an increasingly challenging environment’. The author, familiar to readers of online reviews on the...

Britain 1780-1945: Society under Pressure, Richard Brown, Authoring History, paperback, 2018, ISBN 9781985773370. Richard Brown’s latest social history of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, like David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906, reflects at the outset, upon his good fortune to have grown up in the 1950s in what can...

Britain and the Arab Middle East: World War I and its aftermath by Robert H. Lieshout (I.B. Tauris, 2016) 510pp. £29.95, hard, ISBN 978-1-78453-583-4 In the long years since the invasion of Iraq, the short-lived ‘Arab Spring’, the unending civil wars in Syria, the meteoric rise of Islamic State and...

Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister: Lord Liverpool, Martin Hutchinson, The Lutterworth Press, 2020, 429 pp, £50.00, ISBN 978-0-7188-9563-1  A continuous period of almost 15 years as Prime Minister suggests that Liverpool possessed a large array of talents, yet the average student of modern British history knows much less about him and his characteristics than those...

Britain’s Jews in the First World War, Paula Kitching, Amberley, 2019, 286p, £14-99.  ISBN 978-1-4456-6320-3 The title of this book does not fully convey the importance of its contents and focus. It provides a variety of perspectives on the Jewish involvement in the British war effort in the Great War....

Case Red: The Collapse of France, 1940, Robert Forczyk, Osprey Publishing, 2017, 464p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4728-2442-4 Case Red is a deliberate and very helpful attempt by the American military historian Robert Forczyk to refocus our perspectives on exactly what did happen in June 1940. His view is that most historians...

Cemeteries and Graveyards, Celia Heritage, Pen and Sword, 2022, 236p, £15.99. ISBN 978 1 52670 237 1. This is a most thorough and engaging book. Its focus is specifically the widest context of burials in England and Wales. As a handbook to be used by anyone wanting to understand burial...

Charles I & The People of England, David Cressy, Oxford University Press, 2017, 447pp. £14.99 paper, ISBN 978-0-19-870830-8 Originally published in 2015, this book is a blend of historical analysis and constitutional theory, parish politics and ecclesiology, military, cultural, and social history. Charles I and the People of England is the first major attempt...

Chartism: A Global History and other essays, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2016, 324 pp. £10.96, paper, ISBN 1534981438 This volume of essays written partly, the author reveals, as a response to a student enquiring in 2003 ‘What impact did Chartism have on the rest of the world brings the word...

Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2015, paperback, 408 pp., ISBN 9781517788988 J.M.W. Turner's romanticised depiction, completed in 1838, of vessels being unloaded in the Dee estuary with the first of Edward I's castles at Flint symbolising the eventual subjugation of medieval Wales by the English crown adorns the cover of the...

Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution by Jane Humphries (Studies in Economic History, Cambridge University Press), 2010 439pp., £60, hard, ISBN 978-0-521-84756-8 In Kirkheaton churchyard near Huddersfield there is a 15 foot stone obelisk topped by a flame that commemorates ‘The dreadful fate of 17 children who...

Chinoiserie, Richard Hayman, Shire Publications, 2021, 64p., £8.99. ISBN 978-1-78442-464-0.  Chinoiserie describes the highly imaginative decorative style inspired by a fascination for oriental culture that emerged around 1650, peaked during the Rococo exuberance of the mid-18th century, before going out of fashion in the early-19th century. Motifs including pagodas, pavilions, flowers and...

Churchyards (Britain's Heritage series), Roger Bowdler, Amberley Publishing, 2019, 64p, £8-99. ISBN 9781445691114 This book is dedicated to the memory of Frederick Burgess, the author of English Churchyard Memorials (1963), from whom many of us learned to study and understand what we find in churchyards. This carefully developed study by...

Clarke, Petit and St Mark’s: A 19th Century journey on the Isle of Man, Philip Modiano, RPS Publications, 2022, 44p., £9.00 [plus postage]. ISBN 9781916493117. Contact via enquiries@revpetit.com In this extraordinary booklet Philip Modiano explains the architectural and personal relationship built up between the notable water-colourist, the Revd John Louis Petit,...

Coffee: A Drink for the Devil by Paul Chrystal (Amberley Publishing), 2016 96pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4456-4939-2 In the Western world, coffee consumption is around one-third that of tap water and the poet T.S. Eliot commented that ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ After petroleum, coffee is...