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...

The Pioneering Life of Mary Wortley Montagu: Scientist and Feminist, Jo Willett, Pen and Sword, 2021, 256p, £25-00. ISBN 9781526779380 Mary Wortley Montagu was baptised on 26 May 1689 and died on 21 August 1762 in London. From a wealthy aristocratic family, she had great intellectual curiosity and the opportunities...

The Pirate World: A History of the Most Notorious Sea Robbers, Angus Konstam, Osprey Publishing, 2019, 336p, £25-00. ISBN 976-1-4728-3097-5 Angus Konstam very successfully blends a narrative of how piracy has been a challenge to settled society for at least two thousand years with some very important insights. He explains...

The Point Blank Directive, L. Douglas Keeney, Osprey Publishing, 2012, 272 p, £20.00.  ISBN: 978-1-84908-933-3 This book is about the air war over Germany from 1943 and the complicated preparations for D Day in June 1944. For many months, the Allied air attacks on Germany were the only way of...

The Poisoned Well: Empire and its Legacy in the Middle East, Roger Hardy, Hurst and Company, London, paperback, 2018, ISBN 9781849049542. Roger Hardy worked for more than twenty years as a Middle East analyst with the BBC World service. In this book he ‘unearths an imperial history stretching from North Africa...

The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights by Ben Griffin (Cambridge University Press), 2012   352pp., £60 hard, ISBN 978-1-107-01507-4 The last twenty years has seen a renaissance in the study of the struggle for women's rights in the nineteenth century but...

Vincent Morley (Cork University Press), 2017, 362pp., €39 hard, ISBN 978-1-78205-208-1. This book is a study of the Irish popular mind between the late-seventeenth and the early-nineteenth century. It examines the collective assumptions, aspirations, fears, resentments and prejudices of the common people as they are revealed in their vernacular literature....

The Priest and the Playwright! Parallel Lives in Edwardian London, M. F. Brown, (Pen Press, Brighton, 2009) v, 181pp., paperback, £7.99, ISBN 978 1 906710 63 7This is a record of two very different characters - the American socialite and author, Pearl Craigie, and this author's great-uncle, a Scottish priest,...

The Private Life of Edward IV, John Ashdown-Hill, Amberley Publishing, 2016, 336pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4456-5245-0. Dr John Ashdown-Hill, a central figure in the Looking for Richard Project and a renowned Richard III historian with a special talent for getting behind the mythology of history, now turns his attention to Richard’s...

Francis Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler, (eds.)The Providence of God (T. & T. Clark, London and New York), 2009xi., 338pp., paperback,  ISBN 978 0 567 03341 3, £24.99. hardback, ISBN 978 0 567 03340 6Providence is and has always been both an influential and a controversial concept in Christian...

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain, Tristram Hunt, Allen Lane, 2021, 323pp., £25. ISBN 978-0-24128-789-7.  As MP for Stoke-on-Trent, Tristram Hunt was prominent in the 2014 fight to save the Wedgwood Museum at Barlaston and prevent its contents going to auction. As director of the Victoria...

The Real Falstaff: Sir John Fastolf and the Hundred Years' War, Stephen Cooper (Pen and Sword Military, Barnsley, 2010) xiii, 210pp., hardback, £19.99, ISBN 978 1 84884 123 9.This is the first full biography of Sir John Fastolf, the famous military commander of the Hundred Years' War, on whom Shakespeare...

The Real Mrs Beeton. The Story of Eliza Acton, Sheila Hardy, The History Press, 2011, hardback, 223 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780752461229; Napoleon's Chicken Marengo. Creating the Myth of the Emperor's Favourite Dish, Andrew Uffindell, Frontline Books, 2011, hardback, 276 pp., £19.99 ISBN9781848325784 In twenty-first century austerity Britain there has been...

The Reckoning – The Defeat of Army Group South, 1944, Prit Buttar, Osprey Publishing, 2020, £30, 496 pages, ISBN HB 978-1-4728-3791-2 This is the ninth of Prit Buttar’s non-fiction books about conflict on Germany’s Eastern Front in the First and Second World wars, several of which Trevor James and I...

The Reformation in 100 Facts, Dr Kathleen Chater, Amberley, 2016, paperback, £7.99, 192 pp, ISBN 9781445651347 The year 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s dramatic nailing of his 95 theses on indulgences denying the pope’s right to forgive sins on the church door at Wittenberg, which in itself...

The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Marshall (Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 2009) 153pp., paperback, £7.99, $11.95, ISBN 978 0 19923 131 7 Very short introductions have been produced as a way into a new subject written by experts.  Here Peter Marshall, Professor of History at the...

Gideon Brough (I.B. Tauris), 2017, 313pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-1-78453-593-3. Owain Glyn Dwr is a towering figure in Welsh history and military history. Initially a loyal subject of the king of England, he reluctantly took up arms against the Crown he had served leading the last war of Welsh independence...

The Road Past Mandalay, John Masters, 1961 [reissued 2012] Cassell Military Paperback; ISBN: 978-0-3043-6157-1 The Road Past Mandalay forms the second volume of autobiography by John Masters, covering the period of the Second World War. When war broke out, John Masters was already a junior officer in the Indian Army,...

The SAS in World War II - An Illustrated History, Gavin Mortimer.  Osprey Publishing, 2011, 256 pp, ISBN 978-1-84908-646-2, £20.With so much sensational literature being produced nowadays about Special Forces, it is good to find a book about the history of the Special Air Service (SAS) during World War 2,...

The SBS in World War II - An Illustrated History, Gavin Mortimer, Osprey Publishing, 2013, 256 p, ISBN 978-1-78200-189-8, £20.Gavin Mortimer has established a firm place as a historian of Special Forces in World War Two.  His outstanding books on the SAS (2004 and 2011) and this one on the SBS...