A Short History of the Russian Revolution, Geoffrey Swain, I.B. Tauris, 2017, hardback, 232 pp., £10.99, ISBN 9781780767932 This new interpretation of the events of 1917 by Geoffrey Swain, Honorary Professor Emeritus and former Alec Nove Chair in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, has been...

David Grummitt - (I.B. Tauris), 2013 212 pp., £12.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-84885-875-6 The Wars of the Roses from the first Battle of St. Albans in 1455 to the battle of Stoke in 1487 were one of the longest and savage periods of civil discord in English history.  What began as...

A Soldier of the Seventy-First, Joseph Sinclair, Frontline Books, 2010, 160 pp., £19.99Based on the 1831 issue, this is a work well known from the abridged 1975 edition published by Leo Cooper. Shorter than two pages, Stuart Reid's introduction does not offer much, which is unfortunate as he is a...

Anna Selby, ed., Thomas Allinson, A Victorian Guide to Healthy Living, Pen and Sword, 2009, hardback, 192 pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781844680764Dr Thomas Allinson was a healthy eating campaigner long before Jamie Oliver transformed school dinners in twenty-first century British schools. He founded the famous Allinson Bread firm in 1892 and...

A Year in the Life of Medieval England by Toni Mount (Amberley Publishing), 2016 373pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4456-5239-9 The medieval centuries are often associated with dynastic struggles, grisly wars and the formidable influence of the Church. But what about the everyday experience of the royal subjects and common people?...

Abydos: Egypt's First Pharaohs and the cult of Osiris, David O'Connor (Thames and Hudson, 2011, first published 2009) 216pp., paperback, £18.99, ISBN 978 0 306 500 28900 6. David O'Connor of New York University has been excavating in Nubia and Egypt for forty years but his interest now centres on...

Aethelstan, The First King of England by Sarah Foot (Yale English Monarchs Series, Yale University Press), 2011 283pp., £30, hard, ISBN 978-0-300-12535-1 Most people remember King Alfred, if only because he is the only English monarch to be accorded the title ‘the Great' but far fewer people will have heard...

Alias Blind Larry. The Mostly True Memoir of James Laurence The Singing Convict, Rob Wills, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016, 366pp., $39.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-925333-11-4. Rob Wills maintains that most convict memoirs are saturated with piety and penitence. But this is not the case with James Laurence. Alias Blind Larry is a convict story, an...

All for Freedom: a True Story of Escape from the Nazis, D. T. Davies [with Ioan Wyn Evans], Gomer Press, 2016, 160 p, £9-99. ISBN 978 1785621680. After the Second World War, David Davies worked successfully in the electrical installation business for over forty years and also became prominent in...

American Tanks & AFVs of World War II, Michael Green, Osprey Publishing, 2014, 376 pp, £30.00. ISBN: 978 1 78200 931 3. No better author could have been found for this book.  Michael Green has written or co-written over 100 books on military subjects and is an expert on US...

Ivan Berend - (Cambridge University Press), 2012 528pp., £23.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-107-68999-2 There has long been a need for a textbook on the ways in which the economy developed in nineteenth century Europe.  This new transnational survey answers that need exploring the regional differences that shaped the economic course of...

An Illustrated Introduction to the Stuarts, Pamela Womack, Amberley, 2014, paperback, 96 pp, £9.99 ISBN 9781445637884 The publisher's blurb for this new ‘Illustrated Introductions' series from Amberley enquires engagingly of the reader: ‘Fascinated by history? Wish you knew more? The Illustrated Introductions are here to help. In this lavishly illustrated,...

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...

Ancestral Houses: The Lost Mansions of Wales, Paul White, Damian Walford Davies and Sian Melangell Dafydd, 2012, Gomer Press, 119p, ISBN 9781848513981, £19-99.This is not a conventional local history book: it contains a series of black and white photographs, taken by Paul White, from forty-three Welsh houses in various serious...

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins (B. S. Brewer, Cambridge, Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge and New York, 2010) xiv, 283pp., hardback, £55, US $105, ISBN 978 I 84384 2514.This is a volume in the series Medievalism, which claims to cater for monographs and...

Armies of the Greek-Turkish War 1919-22, Philip S Jowett, Osprey Publishing, 2015, £9.95, 48 pages, ISBN 978-1-4728-0684-0In his introduction to the Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (2014 edition) Sir Hew Strachan noted that warfare didn't end neatly because an armistice was agreed with Germany on 11 November...

Armies of the Napoleonic Wars, edited by Gregory Fremon-Barnes, Pen and Sword Books Ltd, 2011, hardback, 271 pp., £25.00 ISBN 9781848840676; Walcheren 1809. The Scandalous Destruction of a British Army, Martin R. Howard, Pen and Sword Military, 2012, hardback, 242 pp., £19.99 ISBN 9781848844681; Russian Eyewitness Accounts of the Campaign...

Raffaele D'Amato Arms and Armour of the Imperial Roman Soldier from Marius to Commodus, 112 BC - AD 192 (Frontline Books), 2009xiv, 290pp., hardback, folio, £35, ISBN 978 1 84832 512 8.This, the first of three volumes, is without doubt a magnificent production.  As Professor Giorgio Ravegnani of Venice writes...

Art & Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, c.2500-c.150 BCE Richard T. Neer (Thames & Hudson), 2012, 400pp., £35 hard, ISBN 978-0-500-05166-5 This richly illustrated, authoritative and accessible book presents a fresh way of looking at ancient Greek art and archaeology, combining a clear chronological narrative with a...

Arthur and the Kings of Britain. The Historical Truth Behind the Myths, Miles Russell, Amberley Publishing, 2017, hardback, 320 pp., £20.00, ISBN 9781445662749  This exploration of the Dark Ages, as mediated by the twelfth century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain, written in 1136,...