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...

The Pen y Gwryd Hotel: Tales from the Smoke Room, [ed] Rob Goodfellow, Jonathan Copeland and Peter O’Neill,  Gomer Press,  2016,  260p,  £14-99.  ISBN 9781785621499. This is self-evidently not a conventional historical work. The book comprises over sixty different personal reminiscences and comments about a remote hotel in Snowdonia.  However...

The Tudor Kitchen. What the Tudors Ate and Drank, Terry Breverton, Amberley Publishing, 2015, hardback, 352 pp., £20.00, ISBN 9781445648743 Henry VIII’s most characteristic pose at the banquet table in so many screen representations of his reign is hungrily gnawing at a chicken leg before casting the bone casually over...

The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War, Ian Castle, Osprey Publishing, 2015, 208p, £14-99. ISBN 978-1-4728-1529-3 Whilst it is generally a matter of common understanding the ‘Blitz’ was a Second World War phenomenon, Ian Castle argues very strongly and cogently that London had experienced a sustained ‘blitz’...

The Kings and Queens of Scotland, Timothy Venning, Amberley Publishing, 2015, paperback, 336 pp., £9.99, ISBN 9781445648194 This informative illustrated history of the Scottish monarchy explains the origins of the kingdom of the Scots, commenting that it was ‘the last of the non-Anglo-Saxon states of Britain to survive as a...

Georgian Dublin. The Forces that Shaped the City, Diarmuid O Grada, Cork University Press, 2015, hardback, 400 pp., £35.00, ISBN 9781782051473 Diarmuid O Grada, a planning consultant and occasional lecturer in planning at University College Dublin, offers a fresh perspective in this lively revisionist study which challenges traditional depictions of...

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...

London Fog, Christine L. Corton, Harvard University Press, 2015, 391p, £22-95, ISBN 978-0-674-08835-1 London Fog is a very thorough piece of research into a phenomenon which was effectively ended by the Clean Air Act of 1962. It is written in a very engaging manner and its scientific exploration is exemplary....

The 1916 Irish Rebellion by Briona Nic Dhiarmada (Cork University Press), 2016 205pp., £19.99 hard, ISBN 978-1-78205-191-6 In the centenary of the Easter Rising, it is hardly surprising that there has been an upsurge of publications and re-publications on this seminal event in Irish history.  Like the rebellions in 1798,...

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...

The Witches: Salem, 1692, a History by Stacy Schiff (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), 2015 496pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4766-0224-2 The early 1690s were years of considerable anxiety in the New England colonies that were faced with spectral threats and actual threats from Native Americans and from without by a resurgent English...

Tragic Encounters: The People’s History of Native Americans by Page Smith (Amberley Publishing), 2015 477pp., £25, hard, ISBN 978-1-4456-5402-7 Page Smith was one of America’s greatest historians. He made his mark with a history of the United States published in eight volumes, each volume carrying the subtitle ‘A People’s History...

Ivy-Mantled Tower. A History of the Church and Churchyard of St Mary Hornsey, Middlesex, Bridget Cherry, Hornsey Historical Society, 2015, hardback, 133 pp., £19.50, ISBN 9780905794532 The Hornsey Historical Society are to be congratulated on their production of this beautifully illustrated, informative history of a parish church whose derelict tower...

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...

An Imperial Crisis in British India: The Manipur Uprising of 1891 by Caroline Keen (I.B. Tauris, 2015) 214pp., £58, hard, ISBN 978-1-78453-103-4 In 1891 a major anti-British revolt erupted in the northeast Indian princely state of Manipur after a dangerously miscalculated attempt by the Government of India to assert its...

Notice to Quit: The Great Irish Famine Evictions by Perry Curtis, Jr (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press), 2015 44pp., £9.95, €11.95, paper, ISNM 978-0-9904686-6-0 Death in Every Paragraph: Journalism & the Great Irish Famine by Michael Foley (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University...

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...

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...

Political Pamphlets & Sermons from Wales, 1790-1806 by Marion Löffler with Bethan Jenkins (University of Wales Press), 2014 322pp., £24.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-78316-100-3 In the aftermath of the outbreak of the French Revolution, there was an intense political debate across Britain about the nature of government and the question of...

In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870-1914 by Gillian Sutherland (Cambridge University Press), 2015187pp., £55 hard, ISBN 978-1-107-09279-2 Women increasingly demanded and gained constructive and useful roles in society with campaigns for control over property, economic independence and admission to education and to the...