History in the Discursive Condition: Reconsidering the tools of thought by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth  (Routledge), 2011 144pp., £22.99,  paper, ISBN 978-0-415-78219-7This is a bold and challenging book in which Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth traces the broadly established challenges to modernity that now confront historians and more generally citizens of Western societies....

History of the Waterloo Campaign. The Classic Account of the Last Battle of the Napoleonic Wars, H.T. Siborne, Frontline Books, Barnsley, 2016, hardback, £25.00, pp. 584, ISBN 9781848329614 Military historians and a wider range of readers enticed by the blood and thunder exploits of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe in the...

History: An introduction to theory, method and practice Peter Claus and John Marriott (Pearson Education), 2012 461pp., £22.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-4058-1254-2It is hardly surprising that the theory of history is a subject that many students try to avoid.  In my student days, you were expected to read Carr, Elton and...

Hitler's Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man in Vienna Brigitte Hamann (I.B. Tauris), 2010   482pp., £12.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-84885-277-8First published in 1999 and reissued with a short forward by Hans Mommsen, Brigitte Hamann considers the formative years that Hitler spent in Vienna as a means of trying...

Hitler’s British Isles: The Real Story of the Occupied Channel Islands, Duncan Barrett, Simon and Schuster, 2018, 413p, £20-00.  ISBN 978-1-4711-6637-2 Having just read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Bloomsbury 2008), this very interesting book has now extended considerably my understanding of the nature of the experiences of...

Holding the Line: The Naval Air Campaign in Korea, Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, Osprey, 2021, 320p, £14-99. ISBN 9781472831736. This provides a very thorough introduction to how the politics behind military strategy operates in the United States. What we find, with extraordinary parallels with our own time, is that after the...

Hopes and Fears for the Future in Early Modern Sweden, 1500-1800, edited by Petri Karonen (Suomalaisen kirjallisauden Seura, Finnish Literature Society, Helsinki, 2009) 370pp., softback, £26.50, ISBN 978 952222 142 1Some fifteen scholars working in Sweden and Finland have contributed to this book under the editorship of Petri Karonen, Professor...

How Norwich Fought Against the Plague: Lessons from the Past, Frank Meeres, Poppyland Publishing, 2021, 138p, £9.95. ISBN 9781909796898 The importance of this book has already been acknowledged at a regional level by having been awarded the 2021 East Anglia Book Award for History and Tradition. What Frank Meeres has...

Told through words and pictures: how women challenged the "go home and sit still - no petticoats here" message from Whitehall and did their bit during the First World War. Women in the First World War: Neil R Storey & Molly Housego ISBN: 978-07478-752-0, £5.99, Published 10th April 2010When war...

Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification, 1500 to the Present by Edward Higgs  (Continuum), 2011  286pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-1-4411-8203-6 Who we are is increasingly seen as an important issue in British politics and is an integral part of the increasingly pervasive and intrusive ‘information and security state'.  We...

If the Allies Had Fallen. Sixty Alternate Scenarios of World War II by Dennis Showalter and Harold C. Deutsch. Frontline Books, 2010, hardback, 304 pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781848325661The joint editors of this stimulating collection of explorations of alternative military strategies of the Second World War, Dennis Showalter and Harold Deutsch,...

If the Kaiser Comes. Defence Against A German Invasion of Britain in the First World War, Mike Osborne, Fonthill, 2017, paperback, 192 pp., £16.99, ISBN 9781781555750  As commemoration of so many facets of the First World War continue to mark its centenary, particularly focused upon the casualties and fatalities sustained...

Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire by Shereen Ilahi (I.B. Tauris, 2016) 258pp., £ 59, ISBN 978-1-78453-130-0 In the aftermath of World War I, the British Empire was hit by two different crises on opposite sides of the world: the Jallianwala Bagh...

In Cold War Skies: NATO and Soviet Air Power, 1949-89, Michael Napier, Osprey, 2020, 320p, £30-00. ISBN 978-1-4728-3688-5. This book will appeal to two separate audiences. At one level Michael Napier has provided in extraordinary detail the nature and development of air defence in the widest reaches of the European...

In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, Martin Gilbert, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2010) xxiii, 424pp., hardback, £25, ISBN 978 0 7210 3369 8This is a remarkable book by Sir Martin Gilbert, a bestselling author.  He refers to the Biblical story of Ishmael and...

In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870-1914 by Gillian Sutherland (Cambridge University Press), 2015187pp., £55 hard, ISBN 978-1-107-09279-2 Women increasingly demanded and gained constructive and useful roles in society with campaigns for control over property, economic independence and admission to education and to the...

In the Age of Averroes; Arabic Philosophy in the Sixth / Twelfth Century, edited by Peter Adamson (Warburg Institute, University of London and Turin, 2011) softback, 288pp., £60.00, ISBN 978 0 85481 154 0This colloquium is in the series published by the Warburg Institute at London and Nino Aragno Editore...

In the Context of Eternity. A Short History of the Christian Church, David Arnold, Grosvenor House Publishing Limited, 2015, paperback, 303 pp., £10.00, ISBN 9781781484487 This compact overview, by a recently elected Fellow of the Historical Association, combines erudition with accessibility and is a welcome addition to the history of...

Notice to Quit: The Great Irish Famine Evictions by Perry Curtis, Jr (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press), 2015 44pp., £9.95, €11.95, paper, ISNM 978-0-9904686-6-0 Death in Every Paragraph: Journalism & the Great Irish Famine by Michael Foley (Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University...

Ireland: A History by Thomas Bartlett(Cambridge University Press), 2010625pp., £25 hard, ISBN 0-978-521-19720-5There are many good histories of Ireland such as the Oxford History of Ireland series, the two volumes by Connolly on the early modern period and Paul Bew on the period after 1789 but we lack a well-written...