Coffee: A Drink for the Devil by Paul Chrystal (Amberley Publishing), 2016 96pp., £9.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4456-4939-2 In the Western world, coffee consumption is around one-third that of tap water and the poet T.S. Eliot commented that ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ After petroleum, coffee is...

Come Wind, Come Weather: Storm: Tempest and Other Natural Phenomena within Local Sources, Trevor James, Lichfield Press, 2021, 116p. £10-00.  ISBN 978-0-905985-62-6  What a pleasure it is to review a book by that arch-reviewer, Dr Trevor James. This book follows closely on his previous one, England’s Saintly Landscapes, and confirms...

Concrete Hell - Urban warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq, Louis A DiMarco, Osprey Publishing, 2012, £20, 232 pages, ISBN 978-1-84908-792-6.Dr Louis DiMarco was a US Army officer for 24 years, retiring in 2005 as a Lieutenant Colonel.  He now teaches military history and urban warfare theory at the US Army...

Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and Terror in the Cold War Caribbean, Alex von Tunzelmann, Simon and Shuster, 2011, 505p, ISBN 978-1-84737-450-9, £25-00.For those of us who remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and indeed who have vivid memories of the wider Cold War power politics of the 1950s and 1960s, Alex...

Coping with Change: British Society, 1780-1914, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2013, vi + 762, £21.88, paper ISBN 13: 978-1492969129; 10: 1492969125The title of Richard Brown's revised, composite history of British society unusually draws parallels between Britain today and Britain during the ‘long' nineteenth century. It thus provides a distinctly fresh...

Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis, Robert Beaken, I.B. Taurus, 2012, hardback, 300 pp., £25.00, ISBN 9781780763552Cosmo Lang's historical reputation as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928-42, as his most recent successor Rowan Williams observes in an astute foreword to this new revisionist biography, has suffered not only from contemporary...

Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing, Molly Farrell, Oxford University Press, 2016, 280pp., £41.99, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-027731-4. Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so pervasive that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was no word for ‘population’ in the sense...

Coventry and Warwickshire 1914-1919: Local Aspects of the Great War, Vol.1, [ed] Chris Holland, Warwickshire Great War Publications, 2012, 146p, £9-95. ISBN 978-0-9574216-1-5. Obtainable from Chris Holland, Plott Bungalow, Plott lane, Stretton on Dunsmore, Rugby CV23 9HR. This is the first volume, with at least one more to follow. It...

Coventry and Warwickshire 1914-1919: Local Aspects of the Great War, Vol 2, [ed] by Chris Holland, Warwickshire Great War Publications, 2014, 172pp, £9.95. ISBN: 978-0-9574216-3-9. Available from Chris Holland, Plott Bungalow, Plott Lane, Stretton on Dunsmore, Rugby, CV23 9HR.Following on from Volume 1 in 2012, Chris Holland and his fellow...

Crime on the Canals, Anthony Poulton-Smith, Pen and Sword, 2019, 120p, £12-99. ISBN 9781526754783. This interesting book is presented as an exposure of criminality on the canal system, and it does achieve that objective rather well. It has to be said that it is more about crime than canals, although...

D-Day: The Soldiers’ Story, by Giles Milton, London, John Murray, 2018, ISBN 978-1-473-4901-9. £25.00 Why one side wins, and another does not, is the key element in military history. That element is not well answered by focusing on the face of battle, the approach that is so often taken today....

Secret Weapons - Death Rays, Doodlebugs and Churchill's Golden Goose, Brian J Ford,  Osprey Publishing, 2013, 280 p, ISBN 978-1-78096-721-9, £9.99.In this paperback Professor Ford covers much of the ground of Secret Weapons: Technology, Science and the Race to Win World War II published by Osprey in 2011.  As such...

Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 by David Fitzpatrick(Cambridge University Press), 2014271pp., £65 hard, ISBN 978-1-1076-08093-5This book examines Protestant loss of power and self-confidence in Ireland since 1795, as process of ‘descendancy', a neat play on the Protestant ‘Ascendancy' in the eighteenth century. From the 1790s, there were a growing...

Dinefwr: A Phoenix in Wales, Gerald Morgan, Gomer Press, 2014, 227p, £19-99. ISBN 978-1-84851-820-9.This fascinating book offers the complexities of varying spellings of place names and surnames as it charts the long story of an historic site. Although it was attached to many other landholdings, both in Wales and England,...

The Golden Age of Arbitration: Dispute Resolution under Elizabeth I by Derek Roebuck (Holo Books), 2015365pp., £40, ISBN 978-0-9572153-0-6 Derek Roebuck has, over the last fifteen years, published four books on dispute arbitration covering the Greek, Roman, early English and Middle Age English periods. This new volume examines Elizabeth I's...

Doing History by Mark Donnelly and Claire Norton - (Routledge), 2011  237pp., £12.99, paper, ISBN 978-0-415-56577-6Recently there appears to have been a proliferation of ‘short and accessible' studies of the nature of history, how to study it and the best ways of communicating it to others in essay, dissertation, article...

Doodlebugs, Gas Masks and Gum. Children's Voices from the Second World War, Christina Rex, Amberley, 2012, paperback, 192 pp. ISBN 9781445607023This paperback edition of a well-received hardback edition published in 2009 presents wartime Britain ‘through the eyes of children who were there'. The author, who was two years old when...

Dr J.A. Langford (1823-1903). A Self-Taught Working Man and the Sale of American Degrees in Victorian Britain, Stephen Roberts, Authoring History, paperback, 2014, 65 pp. ISBN 9781495475122John Alfred Langford, is depicted in later life on the cover of this fascinating, brief, biographical profile as an elderly figure with long straggling...

Duels and Duelling, Stephen Banks, Shire, paperback, 2012, £6.99, 56 pp.,  ISBN 9780747811435.Stephen  Banks's compact volume on Duels and Duelling maintains the well-deserved reputation of this established series for attractively produced, well-illustrated and well-researched thematic studies accessible to the general reader. The index ranging from Achilles to Zola (Emile) provides...

Dunkirk to Belsen - John SadlerIn the closing days of the Second World War, men from 113 LAA Battalion RA, originally the 7th Battalion DLI, part of the British 8th Corp, were tasked with taking over an ‘internment camp' from the German Military. This ‘Internment camp' turned out to be...