Staffordshire’s War: Voices of the First World War, Karen Hunt, Amberley, 2017, 160p, £14-99. ISBN 978-1-4456-5785-1 In Staffordshire’s War Professor Karen Hunt has reflected the best intentions of the Editors of The Historian when they initiated their ‘Aspects of War’ series of articles, designed to explore the widest possible context...

Case Red: The Collapse of France, 1940, Robert Forczyk, Osprey Publishing, 2017, 464p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4728-2442-4 Case Red is a deliberate and very helpful attempt by the American military historian Robert Forczyk to refocus our perspectives on exactly what did happen in June 1940. His view is that most historians...

Rorke’s Drift: A New Perspective, Neil Thornton, Fonthill Media Limited, 2016, 192pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-78155-553-8. The battle of Rorke’s Drift on 22-23 January 1879 is established in history as one of Britain’s most incredible actions, where approximately 155 defenders held off a Zulu force of over 4,000 warriors in a savage,...

Alias Blind Larry. The Mostly True Memoir of James Laurence The Singing Convict, Rob Wills, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016, 366pp., $39.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-925333-11-4. Rob Wills maintains that most convict memoirs are saturated with piety and penitence. But this is not the case with James Laurence. Alias Blind Larry is a convict story, an...

Wealth and Disaster: Atlantic Migrations from a Pyrenean Town in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, John Hopkins University Press, 2016, 230pp., $45 hard, ISBN 978-1-4214-2128-5. In 1729, Marc-Antoine Lamerenx, a minor French nobleman, set sail for Saint-Domingue. Twenty years later, peasant Jean Mouscardy also made the long and difficult journey to Saint-Domingue. Although...

Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing, Molly Farrell, Oxford University Press, 2016, 280pp., £41.99, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-027731-4. Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so pervasive that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was no word for ‘population’ in the sense...

The Private Life of Edward IV, John Ashdown-Hill, Amberley Publishing, 2016, 336pp., £20 hard, ISBN 978-1-4456-5245-0. Dr John Ashdown-Hill, a central figure in the Looking for Richard Project and a renowned Richard III historian with a special talent for getting behind the mythology of history, now turns his attention to Richard’s...

The Spies of Winter: The CGHQ Codebreakers who fought the Cold War Sinclair McKay, Aurum Press, 2016, 330 pp., £9.99, ISBN 978 178131 298 8. A superbly accessible account of the intelligence war after 1945. Very good on the nature of the life, on relations with the United States, and...

The Geraldines and Medieval Ireland: The Making of a Myth, Peter Crooks & Sean Duffy (editors); Four Courts Press, 2016, 408pp., €50 hard, ISBN978-1-84882-571-2. From the earliest moments of their involvement in Ireland, the Geraldines (or FitzGeralds) - the greatest of the Anglo-Norman dynasties established in Ireland after 1169 - became shrouded in...

Letters of Solidarity and Friendship: Czechoslovakia 1968-71, [ed] David Parker, Bacquier Books, 2017, 436p, £14-99. ISBN 978-5262-0603-9 These Letters of Solidarity and Friendship are, in effect a tribute by Professor David parker to a letter-writing relationship which his late father, Leslie Parker, had with Paul Zalud in Czechoslovakia. Leslie was...

Michael A. Flower, (editor) (Cambridge University Press), 2017, 520 pp, £ 26.99, paper, ISBN 978-1-107-65215-6. Herodotus and Thucydides, though not household names, are probably known by most teachers of history, even if they are unlikely to have read or analysed their ‘Histories’. The same cannot be said of the philosopher...

Vincent Morley (Cork University Press), 2017, 362pp., €39 hard, ISBN 978-1-78205-208-1. This book is a study of the Irish popular mind between the late-seventeenth and the early-nineteenth century. It examines the collective assumptions, aspirations, fears, resentments and prejudices of the common people as they are revealed in their vernacular literature....

Gideon Brough (I.B. Tauris), 2017, 313pp., £25 hard, ISBN 978-1-78453-593-3. Owain Glyn Dwr is a towering figure in Welsh history and military history. Initially a loyal subject of the king of England, he reluctantly took up arms against the Crown he had served leading the last war of Welsh independence...

Folly and Malice: The Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and the Start of World War One, John Zametica, Shepheard-Walwyn, 2017, 766p, £27-95. ISBN 0856835137. This painstaking and meticulous piece of scholarship offers a challenge to some widely-held assumptions about the events which led up to the outbreak of World War One....

A Short History of the Russian Revolution, Geoffrey Swain, I.B. Tauris, 2017, hardback, 232 pp., £10.99, ISBN 9781780767932 This new interpretation of the events of 1917 by Geoffrey Swain, Honorary Professor Emeritus and former Alec Nove Chair in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, has been...

Volunteers and Pressed Men. How Britain and its Empire Raised Its Forces in Two World Wars, Roger Broad, Fonthill, 2016, hardback, 206 pp., £20.00, ISBN 9781781553961 This volume focuses specifically upon recruitment for the two World Wars of the twentieth century, which will enable students to readily compare and contrast...

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...

Women and the Great Hunger, Christine Kinealy, Jason King and Ciaran Reilly, Cork University Press, 2017, paperback, 236 pp., £21.95, ISBN 97809909454  The seventeen editors and authors contributing to this groundbreaking study include some of the leading researchers in Irish studies, offering new scholarship, methodologies and perspectives on this immense...

1016 and 1066. Why the Vikings caused the Norman Conquest, Martyn and Hannah Whittock, Robert Hale, 2016, paperback, 160 pp., £12.99, ISBN 9780719819193  Martyn Whittock, a secondary school history teacher (many of whose 42 history books I used in my own teaching), and Hannah Whittock, who read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at...

Passchendaele 1917: The Tommies’ Experience of the Third battle of Ypres, Robert J. Parker, Amberley, 2017, 288p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4456-5571-0 This very coherent commentary and analysis of what we know as the ‘Passchendaele’ campaign in 1917 is sub-titled ‘The Tommies’ Experience of the Third battle of Ypres’ but in reality...