Come Wind, Come Weather: Storm: Tempest and Other Natural Phenomena within Local Sources, Trevor James, Lichfield Press, 2021, 116p. £10-00.  ISBN 978-0-905985-62-6  What a pleasure it is to review a book by that arch-reviewer, Dr Trevor James. This book follows closely on his previous one, England’s Saintly Landscapes, and confirms...

Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing, Molly Farrell, Oxford University Press, 2016, 280pp., £41.99, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-027731-4. Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so pervasive that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was no word for ‘population’ in the sense...

Crime on the Canals, Anthony Poulton-Smith, Pen and Sword, 2019, 120p, £12-99. ISBN 9781526754783. This interesting book is presented as an exposure of criminality on the canal system, and it does achieve that objective rather well. It has to be said that it is more about crime than canals, although...

D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story, by Giles Milton, London, John Murray, 2018, ISBN 978-1-473-4901-9. £25.00 Why one side wins, and another does not, is the key element in military history. That element is not well answered by focusing on the face of battle, the approach that is so often taken today....

Dunkirk to Belsen - John SadlerIn the closing days of the Second World War, men from 113 LAA Battalion RA, originally the 7th Battalion DLI, part of the British 8th Corp, were tasked with taking over an ‘internment camp' from the German Military. This ‘Internment camp' turned out to be...

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...

Early Medieval Kent 800-1220, Sheila Sweetinburgh (ed.) (Boydell Press Kent County Council), 2016 333pp., £50 hard, ISBN 978-0-85115-583-8. This is the tenth volume in the Kent History Project, supported by Kent County Council, that now covers the history of the county from the archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon period through to...

Edward II by Seymour Phillips (Yale English Monarchs, Yale University Press), 2010 679pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-15657-7 Stuck between two of the greatest medieval English monarchs his father Edward I, the ‘Hammer of the Scots' and his son Edward III, it is hardly surprising that Edward II has gained the...

Edward III by Mark Ormrod (Yale English Monarchs, Yale University Press), 2011 721pp., £30, hard, ISBN 978-0-300-11910-7 With the publication of Edward III, the English Monarchs series now includes biographies of monarchs from Edward the Confessor to Mary Tudor (apart from Henry III and IV) and James II to George...

Elfrida: The First Crowned Queen of England by Elizabeth Norton (Amberley Publishing), 2013, 2014 - 19pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4456-3765-5 The role played by elite women in Anglo-Saxon England and their influence in both politics and religion is now widely recognised. Elfrida is perhaps the most powerful and notorious of...

Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War, Dana Greene, Oxford University Press, 2018, 258p, £25-00. ISBN 978-0-19-882084-0. This biography contains much detail on Elizabeth Jennings’ life and poetry. Jennings (1926-2001), born into a Roman Catholic family in Oxford, was often depressed, guilt-ridden, needy and lonely. However, for long periods of her life she...

England’s Saintly Landscape, Trevor James, Lichfield Press, 2020, 95 pp, £10-00. ISBN 978-0-905985-94-7 The author is quick to credit W G Hoskins and Eilert Ekwall and their influence is readily apparent in the enthusiasm that permeates this study. Trevor James’ contention is that church dedications, place names, pilgrimage routes, local industries, fairs and...

Erasmus Darwin and Evolution, Desmond King-Hele, Stuart Harris [3 Pingle Head, 171 Millhouses Lane, Sheffield S7 2HD], 2014, 212p, £8-00. ISBN 978-0-9542-1518-7 Desmond King-Hele is foremost amongst contemporary scholars who have explored the life, work and ideas of Erasmus Darwin. A substantial portion of this book is a basic introduction...

Europe’s 100 Best Cathedrals, Simon Jenkins, Penguin Books Ltd, 2021, 360pp., £30, ISBN: 978-0-241452-63-9. Ever leafed through one of the visitor books found in many of our churches and read the comments? ‘Very peaceful’, ‘Lovely’, ‘Beautiful’, and similar well-meaning but bland observations are typical. Coming up with something more meaningful isn’t...

Fair Seed-Time: Robert Evans, Francis Newdigate and the Making of George Eliot, David Paterson, Troubadour, 2019, 306p, £12-00. ISBN 978-1-83859-146-5 ‘Fair seed-time’ is a phrase used by William Wordsworth and echoed in a comment by George Eliot when she wrote ‘these hours were seed to all my after good’. Co-incidental...

Finland at War: The Continuation and Lapland Wars 1941-45,Vesa Nenye, with Peter Munter, Toni Wirtanen and Chris Birks.Osprey Publishing, 2016, 336p, £30.00, ISBN: 978-1-4728-1526-2 This volume explores Finland's part in World War II and is a continuation of the 2015 book on the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by the...

Folly and Malice: The Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and the Start of World War One, John Zametica, Shepheard-Walwyn, 2017, 766p, £27-95. ISBN 0856835137. This painstaking and meticulous piece of scholarship offers a challenge to some widely-held assumptions about the events which led up to the outbreak of World War One....

Frans Hals: The Male Portrait, Lelia Packer and Ashok Roy, The Wallace Collection, Philip Wilson Publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021, 130pp., £20. ISBN 978-1-78130-110-4.  The Wallace Collection, bequeathed to the nation in 1897, houses the art collection of the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, widely regarded...

Free Seats for All: The boom in church building after Waterloo, Gill Hedley, Umbria Press, 2018, 20p, £20-00, ISBN 978-1-910074-16-1 This is a welcome addition to our detailed understanding of the growth of Anglican church building in the 19th Century. It stands as a very helpful complement to M.H. Port’s Six Hundred...

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, David Wootton (Yale University Press, 2010, London and New Haven) xii, 328pp., hardback £25, ISBN 978 0 300 125 368This is a ground-breaking work by David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at York.  It provides convincing evidence that Galileo (1564-1642) was a Copernican earlier than...