Warriors of the Queen. Fighting Generals of the Victorian Age, William Wright, Spellmount, 2014, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780752493176The publisher's blurb characterizes the subjects of this collective biography as ‘a disparate and fascinating assemblage, made up of men of true military genius as well as egoists, fools and despots'. Surveying the...

Finland at War: The Continuation and Lapland Wars 1941-45,Vesa Nenye, with Peter Munter, Toni Wirtanen and Chris Birks.Osprey Publishing, 2016, 336p, £30.00, ISBN: 978-1-4728-1526-2 This volume explores Finland's part in World War II and is a continuation of the 2015 book on the Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 by the...

First Russia, then Tibet; Travels through a Changing World, Robert Byron (I. B. Tauris, 2011, first published by Macmillan 1933) 254pp., paperback, £17.99 ISBN 978 1 84885 424 6.Robert Byron was tragically killed at the age of 35 in 1941 when the ship he was in was torpedoed.  He was...

Folly and Malice: The Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and the Start of World War One, John Zametica, Shepheard-Walwyn, 2017, 766p, £27-95. ISBN 0856835137. This painstaking and meticulous piece of scholarship offers a challenge to some widely-held assumptions about the events which led up to the outbreak of World War One....

Frans Hals: The Male Portrait, Lelia Packer and Ashok Roy, The Wallace Collection, Philip Wilson Publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021, 130pp., £20. ISBN 978-1-78130-110-4.  The Wallace Collection, bequeathed to the nation in 1897, houses the art collection of the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, widely regarded...

Free Seats for All: The boom in church building after Waterloo, Gill Hedley, Umbria Press, 2018, 20p, £20-00, ISBN 978-1-910074-16-1 This is a welcome addition to our detailed understanding of the growth of Anglican church building in the 19th Century. It stands as a very helpful complement to M.H. Port’s Six Hundred...

From Colony to Superpower - U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776, George Herring, Oxford University Press, 2011, 1030 pp., ISBN 9780199765539, £14.99An excellent study of a work that first appeared in hardback in 2008, this is the sole topical volume in the Oxford history of the United States. It effectively offers...

From Democrats to Kings: The Downfall of Athens to the Epic Rise of Alexander the Great, Michael Scott (Icon Books 2010, previously published in 2009) xix, 294pp., paperback, £8.99, ISBN 978 1 84031 131 2This is the first book by Michael Scott, currently Moses and Mary Finley & Fellow of...

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, David Wootton (Yale University Press, 2010, London and New Haven) xii, 328pp., hardback £25, ISBN 978 0 300 125 368This is a ground-breaking work by David Wootton, Anniversary Professor of History at York.  It provides convincing evidence that Galileo (1564-1642) was a Copernican earlier than...

Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction, David Wallace, Oxford University Press, 2017, 172pp., £10.99 hard, ISBN 978-0-19-880506-9 Originally writing over 600 years ago, Geoffrey Chaucer is today enjoying a global renaissance. Poets, translators and audiences from many cultures from Iran to the islands of Japan find Chaucer inspiring. His tale-telling geography is vast, his...

Georgian Dublin. The Forces that Shaped the City, Diarmuid O Grada, Cork University Press, 2015, hardback, 400 pp., £35.00, ISBN 9781782051473 Diarmuid O Grada, a planning consultant and occasional lecturer in planning at University College Dublin, offers a fresh perspective in this lively revisionist study which challenges traditional depictions of...

Germany Ascendant: The Eastern Front 1915, Prit Buttar, Osprey Publishing, 2015, 448p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4728-0795-3 In this book Prit Buttar continues his analysis and narrative on what was happening on the Eastern Front in the Great War from his previous Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front in...

Goering: The Rise and Fall of the Notorious Nazi Leader by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel(Frontline Books), 2011442pp., £17.99, paper, ISBN 978-1-84832-600-2A decorated First World War ‘ace', president of the Reichstag, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe and Hitler's designated successor, Herman Goering was one of most capable and sinister leading figures...

HA President Tony Badger examines the historical context which shapes our understanding of Margaret Mitchell’s enduring novel. I had been a historian of the American South for 50 years and like Ringbaum, I had a secret. I had never read Gone with the Wind. As I came up to retirement...

Great Discoveries in Medicine, edited by William and Helen Bynum, Thames and Hudson, 2011, hardback, 304 pp., £24.95, ISBN 9780500251805 One of the greatest and most enduring triumphs of the secondary Schools History Project has been the introduction of a thematic study of medicine through time. William and Helen Bynum's...

Great Victorian Discoveries. Astounding Revelations and Misguided Assumptions, Caroline Rochford, Amberley, 2015, paperback, 287 pp., £9.99, ISBN 9781445645421 This sequel to the author’s well-received Great Victorian Inventions presents a cornucopia of ‘brilliant and bizarre’ examples of Victorian quests for knowledge of a world, which they dominated in so many other...

Greek Secrets Revealed: Hidden Scottish History Uncovered Book 1 – Edinburgh, Ian McHaffie, self-published, 2022, 200p, £12-00 [including p+p]. ISBN 978-0-9546681-7-4. Copies can be ordered via mchaffie1@incloud.com Professor W. G. Hoskins once commented that one of the principal joys of local history was its inter-disciplinary nature. He could see how...

Haldane: The Forgotten Statesman who Shaped Modern Britain, John Campbell; Hurst and Company, 2020, 482p, £30-00. ISBN 9781787383111 From my years in the sixth form through being a student and teacher, I have referred to what is now a very battered copy of Alan Palmer’s Penguin Dictionary of Modern History. The...

Henry Matthews, Viscount Llandaff, The Unknown Home Secretary, Roger Ward, Fonthill Media, 2019, 96p, £16-99. ISBN 9781781557150. Despite Henry Matthews’ attempt to obstruct a biographical record of his life being prepared, by instructing his niece to burn all his private papers, Roger Ward offers us a well-composed and well-balanced assessment...

Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland, Brent Miles (D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, 2011) x, 272pp., hardback, £60.00 ISBN 978 1 84384 264 4This is volume XXX in the major series Studies in Celtic History.  Brent Miles, Fellow in Early and Medieval Irish at University College, Cork, breaks new...