October 28, 2014 The Making of Home by Judith Flanders Reviewed by Harriet One of the most important distinctions made by Judith Flanders in this fascinating book is that between the concepts of house…
October 23, 2014 Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama Reviewed by Edward Leigh This is the successor volume to The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, which together offer…
October 22, 2014 The Smile Revolution by Colin Jones Reviewed by Harriet I must admit I was initially drawn to this book by the lovely painting on the cover, a self-portrait by the…
October 16, 2014 The Gardens at Brantwood: Evolution of John Ruskin’s Lakeland Paradise by David Ingram Reviewed by Barb Scharf. “It comes as something of a surprise to most people to consider Ruskin the Gardener. Ruskin has been much written…
October 14, 2014 Bed Manners by Dr Ralph Hopton and Anne Balliol Reviewed by Simon Thomas One of the more niche tastes I have, when it comes to books, is for fake etiquette guides (for which…
October 14, 2014 A Message From Martha by Mark Avery Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is an important centenary year; on 1 September, 1914, the world’s last Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) died in Cincinnati…
October 13, 2014 The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome by Gordon Campbell Reviewed by Barb Scharf If you were a member of the English aristocracy residing in Shropshire in the Georgian era, late 1700s to early…
October 9, 2014 A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain by James Hamilton Reviewed by Frances Ambler Mention art and money together and the chances are it’ll conjure up an image of some Saatchi-esque super dealer or…
July 18, 2014 The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a famous and fascinating book, and I think anyone interested in the Great War, or the wider question…
July 18, 2014 Over the Ocean by Erica Fischer Translated by Andrew Brown Reviewed by Jean Morris The media were full of the D-Day commemorations as I read this book – stories of…
July 17, 2014 One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson Reviewed by Harriet Devine If I were to make a list of things I probably wouldn’t want to read a book about, aeroplanes, cars, baseball…
July 11, 2014 Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope Reviewed by Harriet Devine No author of the present day has been at once so much read, so much admired and so much abused….
July 10, 2014 Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill Reviewed by Harriet Devine The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a messy, bloody conflict in which Spanish Republicans fought to save their country from the…
July 10, 2014 The Valley by Richard Benson Reviewed by Victoria Best The best kind of non-fiction, I think, shows us how supposedly ‘average’ ordinary lives are really quite extraordinary. In the…
July 10, 2014 Women of the World by Helen McCarthy Reviewed by Victoria Best When I was sitting my A levels back in 1987, my school thought itself very advanced because it gave us…
April 15, 2014 Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport Reviewed by Harriet Devine On 17 July 1918, four young women walked down twenty-three steps into the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg. The…
April 8, 2014 The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel Reviewed by Harriet Devine For the past couple of years, I have been fascinated by the events of WW2, and have found myself drawn…
