October 2, 2018 Viking Britain: A History by Thomas Williams Review by Liz Dexter Williams opens this wonderful, absorbing book with a big statement about how the Vikings are not afforded the same respect…
September 18, 2018 On Rape by Germaine Greer Review by Anna Hollingsworth To say that the statistics are grim is a blatant understatement. One woman in five will experience sexual violence, but…
August 23, 2018 City of Light by Rupert Christiansen Reviewed by Karen Langley The city of Paris exerts an eternal fascination; chic and glamorous, the haunt of revolutionaries and intellectuals, and stuffed with…
August 16, 2018 King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts by Claudia Gold Review by Liz Dexter Henry II, father of Richard Lionheart and King John, husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine and murderer by instruction of Thomas…
July 12, 2018 Sacred Britannia: The Gods and Rituals of Roman Britain by Miranda Aldhouse-Green Review by Liz Dexter Miranda Aldhouse-Green is a specialist in Romano-British studies and Iron Age archaeology and has written other books on myth and…
June 21, 2018 White King: The Tragedy of Charles I by Leanda de Lisle Review by Julie Barham This is a book that in many ways reads like a novel. That said, it is also a non- fiction…
June 14, 2018 The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder Reviewed by Max Dunbar Why Everything Old Is New Again If I had to recommend a historian on the twentieth century terrors to someone…
May 22, 2018 Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives: The First 1000 Years by Chase F. Robinson A beautiful object, as you can see from the cover image, this is published to be an accessible introduction to pre-modern Islam, looking at…
April 26, 2018 Rex V. Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders by Laura Thompson Review by Karen Langley The Thompson-Bywaters murder case (also known as “The Ilford Murder”) is notorious, but I think most of my previous knowledge…
March 22, 2018 Ghosts of the Tsunami Richard Lloyd Parry Review by Terence Jagger Japan suffers multitudes of earthquakes every year and is among the best prepared countries in the world. Tsunami, too, are…
March 20, 2018 Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Diane Atkinson Review by Liz Dexter This is a huge book in many senses of the word. It’s physically impressive enough to have arrived in a…
March 13, 2018 The Good Mothers by Alex Perry Review by Max Dunbar Operation Shame Nowadays, when we think of the mafia, it’s with a sense of nostalgia. David Chase captured the feel…
February 8, 2018 The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell Review by Karen Langley Although George Orwell’s name resonates most strongly with us nowadays because of his great novels – in particular “Nineteen Eighty…
January 30, 2018 My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown Reviewed by Liz Dexter It’s the book everyone’s been waiting for that fills in the gaps left by Tony Blair’s autobiography and the various…
January 16, 2018 Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann Reviewed by Harriet Most people probably think that the presence of black people in Britain began with the large influx of nearly 500 who…
December 5, 2017 Between the Wars 1919-1939 by Philip Ziegler Review by Terence Jagger So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre…
November 9, 2017 Women and Power by Mary Beard Reviewed by Liz Dexter Mary Beard is described as being ‘Britain’s best–known classicist on the inside front flap of this book. She’s also known…
August 22, 2017 Long Road from Jarrow: A Journey Through Britain Then and Now by Stuart Maconie Review by Liz Dexter This entertaining and thought-provoking book is both a state-of-the-nation essay and an exercise in historical research and re-enactment and Maconie,…
July 20, 2017 Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley Reviewed by Harriet If you’re a watcher of historical TV documentaries, you won’t need introducing to Lucy Worsley, who presents history programmes for the…
July 11, 2017 Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba Reviewed by Helen Parry Among the many people Anne Sebba interviewed for this book was the playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg. During the German occupation of…
June 1, 2017 Aphra Behn: A Secret Life by Janet Todd Review by Harriet ‘Aphra Behn was a woman who wore masks’. So says Janet Todd at the beginning of this monumental, newly revised biography…
April 4, 2017 Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel Translated by Amanda DeMarco Reviewed by Rob Spence Berlin is one of my favourite cities, and I have spent a lot of time walking…
February 2, 2017 The Novel of the Century – The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables by David Bellos Review by Annabel Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is 150 years old in 2017, and doubtless there will be much attention paid them including this…
December 9, 2016 Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Review by Simon Slightly Foxed are beloved for their reprints of memoirs from across the twentieth century, but they also have published a handful…
December 8, 2016 The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor by Elizabeth Norton Reviewed by Laura Marriott The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor concerns itself with the potential marriage between the teenage Elizabeth Tudor and Thomas Seymour. The book…
