Cinema: The Whole Story, ed. Philip Kemp (Thames & Hudson, 2011) 576pp., flexibound, £19.95, ISBN 978 0 500 289471 Sir Christopher Frayling describes film as the art form of the twentieth century.  This is a quite exceptional comprehensive study of the history of the cinema from the earliest days to...

The Human Kind, Alexander Baron, with an introduction by Sean Longden  (Black Spring Press, 2011) xvii, 160pp., paperback, £9.99, ISBN 978 0 948238 47 5This is a work of fiction, written as a series of short stories but it is based on the author's actual experience of war.  It tells...

The Boleyns: The Rise & Fall of a Tudor Family, David Loades (Amberley Publishing, Stroud, 2011) 304pp., hardback, £20.00, ISBN 978 1 4456 0304 9David Loades in 16 books has gained an enviable renown as the story teller of famous Tudors, especially Henry VIII.  The fall of Anne Boleyn and...

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...

A Concise History of Russia by Paul Bushkovitch (Cambridge Concise Histories, Cambridge University Press), 2012  491pp., £19.99 paper, ISBN 978-0-521-54323-1This book is accessible to students and general readers and provides a broad overview of Russian history since the ninth century. The author emphasises the enormous changes in the understanding of Russian...

The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights by Ben Griffin (Cambridge University Press), 2012   352pp., £60 hard, ISBN 978-1-107-01507-4 The last twenty years has seen a renaissance in the study of the struggle for women's rights in the nineteenth century but...

Jonathan Dewhurst: the Curtain Falls, Philip and Susan Taylor, Matador, 2011, ISBN 978-1848767-263. £12-00.In 2001 Philip and Susan Taylor published their Jonathan Dewhurst: The Lancashire Tragedian. In this work they introduced the life and work of Philip's distant relative, Jonathan Dewhurst, who had been an actor and manager of the...

The SAS in World War II - An Illustrated History, Gavin Mortimer.  Osprey Publishing, 2011, 256 pp, ISBN 978-1-84908-646-2, £20.With so much sensational literature being produced nowadays about Special Forces, it is good to find a book about the history of the Special Air Service (SAS) during World War 2,...

The Oxford Handbook of The History of Medicine by Jackson, Mark, (ed.) (Oxford University Press), 2011 672pp., £95, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-954649-7 In recent decades, the history of medicine has emerged as a vibrant focus of study within history and an area of vigorous debates about methods, themes, and sources.  The...

Edward III by Mark Ormrod (Yale English Monarchs, Yale University Press), 2011 721pp., £30, hard, ISBN 978-0-300-11910-7 With the publication of Edward III, the English Monarchs series now includes biographies of monarchs from Edward the Confessor to Mary Tudor (apart from Henry III and IV) and James II to George...

Perilous Glory: The Rise of Western Military Power by John France(Yale University Press), 2011 438pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-12074-5Is there such a thing as a Western art of war?  The best-selling historian and political commentator argued that there was and for many his views have become almost an article of faith. ...

Aethelstan, The First King of England by Sarah Foot (Yale English Monarchs Series, Yale University Press), 2011 283pp., £30, hard, ISBN 978-0-300-12535-1 Most people remember King Alfred, if only because he is the only English monarch to be accorded the title ‘the Great' but far fewer people will have heard...

The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses, Paul Koudounaris, (Thames and Hudson, London) 224pp., hardback, £29.95, ISBN 978 0 500 25178 2 This is the first book to focus on the world's most important charnel rites, normally inaccessible to the general public.  Paul Koudounaris, who...

The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God by Michael Bentley(Cambridge University Press), 2011 381pp., £50, hard, ISBN 978-1-10700-397-2During the 1950s, the History establishment was dominated by the likes of Lewis Namier, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A.J.P. Taylor and Herbert Butterfield.  Apart from Taylor whose essays and many of...

Narrative Projections of a Black British History - Eva Ulrike Pirker (Routledge), 2011 322pp., £80 hard, ISBN 978-0-415-89375-6 Since the mid-1990s, the black experience in Britain has begun to be intensely renegotiated, with a particular emphasis on history. Narrative Projections of a Black British History considers narratives that construct or...

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....

Doing History by Mark Donnelly and Claire Norton - (Routledge), 2011  237pp., £12.99, paper, ISBN 978-0-415-56577-6Recently there appears to have been a proliferation of ‘short and accessible' studies of the nature of history, how to study it and the best ways of communicating it to others in essay, dissertation, article...

This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles 1485-1746  by Charles Carlton(Yale University Press), 2011 332pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-13913-6Shakespeare did not exaggerate when he defined being a soldier as one of the seven ages of man. Over the early modern period, many millions of young men from the four...

Mary I: England's Catholic Queen by John Edwards (Yale English Monarchs, Yale University Press), 2011 387pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-0-300-11810-0 The life of Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon is often distilled to a few dramatic episodes: her victory over the attempted coup...

A Company of Women Preachers:  Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth Century England; A Reader, edited by Curtis W. Freeman (Baylor University, Waco, Texas, 2011) xv, 824pp., hardback, £66.99, 978 1 60258 318 4 This monumental volume allows the prophetic women with which it is concerned to speak for themselves.  The editor...