London Underground: Architecture, Design and History, David Long with photographs by Jane Magarigal (The History Press, Stroud, 2011) 144pp., hardback, £18.99, ISBN 978 0 7524 5812 0London Underground has been the exemplar the world over for the construction and management of tubes.  David Long has added this volume to his...

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...

London's Sewers, Paul Dobraszczyk, Shire Library, 2014, 64p, £6-99. ISBN 978-0-74781-431-3.One of the engineering achievements of 19th Century Britain was the design and construction of a unified sewage system for London. Of course it was much more than this because it began the process by which the people of London...

London’s Railway Stations, Oliver Green, Shire Publications, 2022, 64p, £9.99. ISBN 978 1 78442 505 0  Genuinely authentic Londoners will be familiar with all thirteen of its railway terminuses and this book, by a recognised expert on London’s railway provision, provides an excellent introduction to the topic which will now...

Lotteries in Colonial America, Neal E. Milliken, (Routledge, New York and Abingdon, 2011) hardback, xiii, 124pp., £80.00, ISBN 978 0 415 88656 7This is an addition to the series Studies in American Popular History and Culture, with eight black and white illustrations.Customarily winners of lotteries sharer their ill-gotten gains with...

Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism, Thomas Brothers, W.W. Norton, 2014, 608 pp., $39.95, ISBN 978 0 393 06582 4An impressive and scholarly work that offers an accessible account of a key development in modernism. Secularly located in an understanding of the culture of interwar America, this book highlights Armstrong's role...

Catherine Rider, Reaktion Books, 2012, hardback, 219 pp., £20.00 ISBN 9781780230351; Yorkshire Witches, Eileen Rennison, Amberley Publishing, 2012, paperback, 128 pp., £12.99 ISBN 9781445602929 Catherine Rider's study of the relationship between religion and the occult in medieval England complements the trailblazing work of Keith Thomas on the early modern era...

Mapledurwell [Victoria History of Hampshire], John Hare, Jean Morrin and Stan Waight, Victoria County History, 2012, 85p. ISBN 978-1-905165-89-6.Mapledurwell is still a relatively remote location near to Basingstoke. This volume is part of the new programme whereby the Victoria County History publishes, in paperback form, parish and urban histories, so...

Mary I: England's Catholic Queen by John Edwards (Yale English Monarchs, Yale University Press), 2011 387pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-11810-0 The life of Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon is often distilled to a few dramatic episodes: her victory over the attempted coup...

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...

John Starling and Ivor Lee, No Labour, No Battle: Military Labour During the First World War, The History Press, 2009 (384pp, incl. 30pp of phtogrpahs; pbk, £19.99) You might wonder why I am telling you about this book.  There have been endless commemorations about WWI, but except for David Olusoga's...

Mocking Men of Power: Comic Art in Birmingham 1861-1911, Stephen Roberts and Roger Ward, Birmingham Biographies, 2014, 147p, £8-99. ISBN 978-1502764560.This is a remarkable book which provides a perspective on the open society which emerged in 19th Century Britain, and which we have inherited richly, in which politicians were ridiculed...

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...

My Life with the Taliban, Abdul Salam Zaeef, edited by Alex Strick van Linscholen and Felix Kuehn (Hurst & Company, London, 2011, first published 2010) xlix, 331pp., hardback £20.00, ISBN 978 1 84904 0266. This is an important and indeed unique book.  It is the only insider account of the...

Nannau: A Rich Tapestry of Welsh History, Philip Nanney Williams, Llwyn Estates Publication, 2016, 393p, £30-00. ISBN 978-0-9955337-0-7 This is an extraordinary book. It is a memorial to the long-established Nannau estate and its long-standing family in Merioneth but it has potential for a much wider readership. Its painstaking research...

Napoleon, Georges Lefebvre, Routledge, 2011, paperback, 595 pp., ISBN 9780415610094 Napoleon Bonaparte continues to fascinate as a succession of bicentennial anniversaries recall his military exploits. This classic biographical study by one of France's pre-eminent twentieth century historians has now been published for the first time as a single volume in...

Narrative Projections of a Black British History - Eva Ulrike Pirker (Routledge), 2011 322pp., £80 hard, ISBN 978-0-415-89375-6 Since the mid-1990s, the black experience in Britain has begun to be intensely renegotiated, with a particular emphasis on history. Narrative Projections of a Black British History considers narratives that construct or...

Norfolk and Suffolk Churches: The Domesday Record, David Butcher, Poppyland Publishing, 2019, 369p, £14-95. ISBN 9781909796614. This is a very specialist book with a seemingly rather local potential audience. However, those who, in the distant past, were much influenced by H. C. Darby’s examination of various aspects of Domesday Geography...

Norman England 1066-1204, Trevor Rowley (Shire Living Histories, Oxford and New York, 2010) 80pp., paperback, £8.99, U.S. $15.95, CAN $17.95, ISBN 978 0 74780 800 6. This is a modest but useful contribution to the literature on Norman England.  It is No. 8 in the Shire Histories which aim to...

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...