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...

Trevor James emphasises the importance of this structure in England’s sporting landscape. Tucked behind the houses in Havelock Road in the East Croydon suburb of Addiscombe is a seemingly unprepossessing building, known locally as ‘Havelock Hall’. Now converted into flats, it derives its name from its late nineteenth-century religious use,...

The recent attacks on Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery have added impetus to the public debate about how we memorialise the dead and the public and private costs of mourning.

Hugh Gault reminds us that the provision of adequate and price-accessible housing stock has been a matter of public debate and concern for over a hundred years. Economics and financial priorities have continued to undermine the methodologies and good intentions needed to solve the problem. This year is the hundredth...

Richard A. Gaunt reminds us that it is still possible to visit the site of a notorious conspiratorial challenge to Lord Liverpool’s government, and why this event was so significant. At around 7.30pm on Wednesday 23 February 1820, a dozen Bow Street Runners in plain clothes, led by George Thomas...

The film Peterloo dramatises the people and events that led to the infamous ‘Peterloo’ massacre in August 1819. Respected film-maker Mike Leigh created the film using historical records and sources from the period, as he and historical adviser Jacqueline Riding explained to the HA in a recent interview, which you can watch below.  

The Pirate World: A History of the Most Notorious Sea Robbers, Angus Konstam, Osprey Publishing, 2019, 336p, £25-00. ISBN 976-1-4728-3097-5 Angus Konstam very successfully blends a narrative of how piracy has been a challenge to settled society for at least two thousand years with some very important insights. He explains...

The Parish Atlas of England: All Early Ordnance Survey 6-inch Maps Traced Over, (ed) T.C.H. Cockin, Malthouse Press, 2017, 898p, £60.00*, ISBN 978-1-907364-10-5. *The Parish Atlas of England is available to Historical Association members at the special price of £45.00 direct from the publishers: The Malthouse Press, Grange Cottage, Malthouse Lane,...

Jenni Hyde was out and about in Derry in 2016 and describes how the sights of the city tell the story of a history which is so much more than just the legacy of the Troubles.

The Great Famine, (ed) John Gibney, Pen and Sword History, 2018, 136p, £12-99. ISBN 9781526736635. This selection of essays, edited by John Gibney, is the first instalment of a collaboration between Pen and Sword History and the History Ireland magazine. Its focus is the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s...

Tom Pickles explores Ryedale in Yorkshire, where an extraordinary network of churches bears witness to the social, political, and religious transformations of the Anglo-Saxon period.

The study of Anglo-Saxon coins shows the sophistication of tenth- and eleventh-century government and of the economy. But they carried a moral and religious message too.

The Book of the Poppy, Chris McNab, The History Press, Stroud, paperback, ISBN 9780750982481 As Remembrance Day is commemorated in 2018 one hundred years on from the ending of hostilities, this concise and evocative compact volume, first published in hardback in 2014 and now reissued in paperback, provides an illuminating...

Britain 1780-1945: Society under Pressure, Richard Brown, Authoring History, paperback, 2018, ISBN 9781985773370. Richard Brown’s latest social history of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, like David Cannadine’s Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906, reflects at the outset, upon his good fortune to have grown up in the 1950s in what can...

Storied Ground. Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity, Paul Readman, Cambridge University Press, hardback, 2018, ISBN 9781108424738 This wide-ranging and stimulating book ‘uncovers why landscape matters so much to the English people, exploring its particular importance in shaping English national identity amid the transformations of modernity’. The obvious...

Travellers in the Third Reich. The Rise of Fascism through the Eyes of Everyday People, Julia Boyd. London: Elliott and Thompson Limited, 2017, 488 pp., ISBN 978 1 78396 381 2, £10.99 A well-written and interesting account that reflects not only a wideranging trawl through a range of sources but...

Jewish service in the UK military forces can be traced back over 300 years. During the First World War that service was demonstrated into the tens of thousands. In this article the contribution of Anglo-Jewry is brought to light.

Richard Broadhead provides a personal view on whether the mammoth task of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission can always be fulfilled, especially at a time of so many anniversaries.

In this article Steve Illingworth explores the conditions for returning British servicemen at the end of the First World War in relation to the promise by Prime Minister Lloyd George about creating ‘a fit country for heroes’. In particular, it looks at the experiences of former soldiers in Salford, a...

Trevor James emphasises the role and importance of ‘messenger’ pigeons on the Western Front. Amidst the one-hundredth anniversary commemorations of the ending of the Great War, there has been a sudden burst of interest, in such varying locations as both Houses of Parliament and the Antiques Roadshow, in the role...