Paradise in Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and the Founding of Australia, Diane Preston, Bloomsbury, 2018, 333pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-1-63286-610-3 William Bligh hold the unenviable record of having suffered two mutinies in his career. The story of the mutiny on the Bounty in April 1789 and of William Bligh's and his men's survival...

Passchendaele 1917: The Tommies’ Experience of the Third battle of Ypres, Robert J. Parker, Amberley, 2017, 288p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4456-5571-0 This very coherent commentary and analysis of what we know as the ‘Passchendaele’ campaign in 1917 is sub-titled ‘The Tommies’ Experience of the Third battle of Ypres’ but in reality...

Petit’s Tours of Old Staffordshire, Philip Modiano, RPS Publications, 2019, 180p [with 185 images], £14-00. ISBN 978-1-9164931-0-0 Occasionally a remarkable book appears on a most unexpected topic. Philip Modiano’s research into the life and creative output of the Reverend John Louis Petit is just one such work. Modiano presents this...

Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History, [ed] Peter Furtado, Thames and Hudson, 2021, 335p, £20-00. ISBN 978-0-500-25258-1. This book is very timely in its arrival. Peter Furtado, the former Editor of History Today, has provided us with two approaches to the issue of Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic. In the...

Poland and the Second World War 1938-48, Evan McGilvray, Pen and Sword, 2019, 344p, £25-00. ISBN 9781473834101. For those of us who understood that the Polish Partitions of the 18th Century had removed the reality of a Polish state from the map of Europe and that at the end of the...

Politics, Society and Homosexuality in Post-War Britain: the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 and its significanceKeith Dockray Fonthill Media, 2017, 96 pp., £14.99. ISBN 978-1-78155-624-5  This book is a good introduction to the legislation concerning and the Establishment attitudes towards gay or ‘homosexual’ society from the latter half of the...

Pontifex Maximus: A Short History of the Popes, Christopher Lascelles, Crux Publishing, 2017, 375pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-909979-45-1 This book is aimed at the general reader who is short on time and seeks an accessible overview unencumbered by ecclesiastical jargon and scholarly controversies. Frank McLynn, author of Genghis Khan, Napoleon and...

Queen Victoria and the European Empires, John Van Der Kiste, Fonthill, 2016, hardback, £18.99, ISBN 9781781555507 John Van Der Kiste has published over forty books, a high proportion of which relate to individual and collective royal biography, in which he has developed considerable expertise, which is evident in his latest...

Ourselves Alone?  Religion, society and politics in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ireland.  Essays presented to S.J. Connolly. W. Hayton and Andrew R. Holmes (editors) (Four Courts Press), 2016 240pp., £50 hard, ISBN 978-1-84682-592-7 This volume was conceived as a tribute to Sean Connolly, who is scheduled to retire next year as...

What’s the point of history? In a time when the value of studying the humanities is often questioned this book provides a genuine attempt to analyse how history impacts on people’s lives. The book explains how the past connects with its public, discussing the role which interpretations play in contributing to social and...

Rome: City in Terror – The Nazi Occupation 1943-44, Victor Failmezger; Osprey Publishing, 2020, 496 pp, £25.00ISBN 978-1-4728-4128-5  Victor Failmezger has written a thorough and detailed narrative of the appalling conditions that existed in Rome in the period from the first Allied bombing of Rome in July 1943 to its liberation on...

Rorke’s Drift: A New Perspective, Neil Thornton, Fonthill Media Limited, 2016, 192pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-78155-553-8. The battle of Rorke’s Drift on 22-23 January 1879 is established in history as one of Britain’s most incredible actions, where approximately 155 defenders held off a Zulu force of over 4,000 warriors in a savage,...

S.E.19: My London Life, 1937-63, Roger Ward, Over Bite Press, 2022, 222p, £10-00. ISBN 978-1-9­­15292-39-1. This is a deeply personal book, written by Professor Roger Ward to describe and explain his early life in Upper Norwood for his children. It is reminiscent of Roy Hattersley’s A Yorkshire Boyhood [1983] and...

Northamptonshire Black History Association Pub 2008; ISBN:978 0 9557139 1 0; £12.95 [+£2.30 p and p] from: NBHA, Doddridge Centre, 109 St James Road, Northampton, NN5 5LD. How fortunate Northamptonshire history teachers are! With the current emphasis on community cohesion and diversity in the New Secondary Curriculum, they are presented...

She-wolves, Helen Castor, Faber and Faber, 2010, 474p, ISBN 978-0-571-23705-0, £20-00.The central focus of Helen Castor's She-wolves is the fact that, when Edward VI died in 1553, every one of his potential successors within the Tudor line was a woman. Unlike in France, there was no clear bar to a...

Ships and Shipbuilders. Pioneers of Design and Construction by Fred M. Walker. Seaforth Publishing, 2010, hardback, 256pp, £25.00, ISBN 9781848320727 This useful reference book offers biographical assessments of the contribution to shipbuilding of more than 130 notable engineers, scientists, philosophers, businessmen, shipwrights, naval architects and inventors who influenced ship design...

The Spies of Winter: The CGHQ Codebreakers who fought the Cold War Sinclair McKay, Aurum Press, 2016, 330 pp., £9.99, ISBN 978 178131 298 8. A superbly accessible account of the intelligence war after 1945. Very good on the nature of the life, on relations with the United States, and...

Sir Richard Tangye 1833-1906: A Cornish Entrepreneur in Victorian Birmingham, Stephen Roberts, Birmingham Biographies, 2015, 65p, £4-99. ISBN 9781512207910. For those interested in the industrial and commercial history of Birmingham, Eric Hopkins’ Birmingham: the First Manufacturing Town in the World 1760-1840 [1989] has been our essential starting point. In contrast...

Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy by Richard A. Gaunt (I.B. Tauris), 2010 264pp., £20 hard. ISBN 978-184885354 The two-volume biography of Peel by Norman Gash was published in 1961 and 1967.  Gash sees Peel as a pragmatic administrator and an instinctively consensual politician whose great achievement was to...

Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957-1973 by Mary E. Daly (Cambridge University Press), 2016 426pp., £19.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-316-50931-9 This provocative new history of Ireland during the long 1960s exposes the myths of Ireland’s modernisation. Mary Daly questions traditional interpretations which see these years as a time...