The Sahara: A Cultural History, Eamonn Gearon, Signal Books, 2011, 264p, ISBN 978-1-904955-82-5, £12-00.Eamonn Gearon has basically taken the whole of North Africa as his focus and yet this reads like the best of regional histories. Fortunately the text is supported by a very helpful map, to which I had...

M.E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa, 3rd edition, Pearson Education Limited, 2010, paperback, 153 pp, £15.19, ISBN 9781408220146This third revised edition of a classic contribution to the groundbreaking Seminar Studies in History is by a former editor of The Historian, Muriel Chamberlain, Emeritus Professor of History at Swansea University, has...

The Secret Queen. Eleanor Talbot The Woman who put Richard III on the Throne, John Ashdown-Hill, The History Press, Stroud, 2016, paper, £9.99 ISBN 9780750968461 This revised edition of a book first published in 2009 and reissued in 2010, with an advertising alert on the front cover promising ‘New Evidence...

The Slave Trade, James Walvin, Thames and Hudson History Files, 2011, paperback, 144 pp, £12.95, ISBN 9780500289174 This is a remarkably compact, beautifully illustrated book and pack on the transatlantic slave trade with the added attraction of ten facsimile documents ranging from a list of goods on a 1688 Dutch...

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark, Penguin Books, 2013, 697p, £10.99, ISBN: 978-0-141-02782-1. Among the many books published about the forthcoming centenary of the First World War, Christopher Clark, the distinguished historian, has produced a masterly survey to try and answer the question - How,...

The Spies of Winter: the GCHQ Codebreakers who fought the Cold War, Sinclair McKay, Aurum Press, 2017, 346p, £9-99. ISBN 978-1-78131-298-8. For anyone interested in the wartime exploits and achievements of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, this will be a compelling sequel. What Sinclair McKay offers is an exploration of...

The Trials of Spinoza, Tariq Ali, (Seagull Books, 2011) 61pp., hardback, price together with a DVD, £13.00, ISBN 978 1 9064 9784 2.This is exquisitely produced, Tariq Ali originally wrote The Trials of Spinoza as a contribution to a series on philosophy for BBC Channel 4 TV and the DVD...

The Trouble with Tea. The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy, Jane T. Merritt, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2017, paperback, 212 pp., £17.00, ISBN 9781421421537 No event in the American Revolution is perhaps more vividly recalled than the Boston tea party - to the extent that, as...

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 Tudors, Richard Rex, Amberley, 2012, paperback, 256 pp., £9.99, ISBN 9781445607009; Margaret of York the Diabolical Duchess, Amberley Publishing, 2012, paperback, 256 pp., £10.99, ISBN 9781445608198; Thomas Cromwell. Henry VIII's Henchman, J. Patrick Coby, Amberley, 2012, hardback, 278 pp., £20.00, ISBN 97801445607757 Richard Rex's popular introductory survey of the...

The Twentieth-Century Russia Reader, Edited by Alastair Kocho-Williams, Routledge, 2011, 350 pp., ISBN 9780415583091An excellent collection of essays that offers much for students. The essays have been published before but they are frequently in sources that students find difficult to access. Moreover, Kocho-Williams is to be congratulated for focusing on...

The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 192 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688100; Life Below Stairs in the Twentieth Century, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 294 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688124; Women in the 1920s, Pamela Horn, Amberley, 2010, paperback, 256 pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781848688117 Amberley are to be...

The Visions of Isobel Gowdie; Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland, Emma Wilby (Sussex Academic Press, Brighton, Portland and Toronto, 2010) xi, 604pp., hardback, £75.00, ISBN 978 1 84519179 5This is the first full-length examination of the famous confessions given by Isobel Gowdie at Auldearn in 1662 which...

Jeremy Black, The War of 1812 in the age of Napoleon, Continuum, 2010, hardback, 256 pp, £25.00, ISBN 9780826436122Dedicated to William Hague, who since this book went to press has now assumed responsibility for Britain's conduct of Anglo-American relations in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Professor Jeremy Black's...

Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front in 1914, Prit Buttar, Osprey Publishing, 2014, 472p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-78200-648-0.In introducing his research and narrative, Prit Buttar makes the point that there is a tendency to consider the Great War from the perspective of what happened on the borders of...

The White Rose of Stalingrad: The Real-life Adventure of Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak, the Highest scoring Female Air Ace of All Time, Bill Yenne, Osprey Publishing, 2013, 319p, ISBN 9781849088107. £20-00.The title of this extraordinary book does not fully convey the full breadth of what this book reveals and explores.It does...

The Wine Trade in Medieval Europe 1000-1500, Susan Rose, (Continuum, London and New York, 2011) xviii, 197pp., hardback, £65.00 ISBN 978 0 8264 2584 3This book explains both how and why wine became so widely traded but also its importance in medieval life.  The revenue from the charges and taxes...

The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, Ronald Hutton, Yale University Press, 2017, 360pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-22904-2 Why have societies across the globe feared witchcraft? This book delves deeply into its context, beliefs and origins in Europe's and global history.  Witches came to prominence –...

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...

They Shall Not Pass: The British Battalion at Jarama, Ben Hughes, Osprey, 2011, 272p, ISBN 978-1-84908-549-6, £20-00.In one respect this is largely an account of a four-day engagement in the early days of the Spanish Civil War and which involved British volunteers from the International Brigade. Ben Hughes brings alive...