Throwing light on the medieval female voice - 'Women's Writing in Middle English' part of the revised Longman Annotated Texts seriesPrice: 12.99 each Publisher: Longman The Middle Ages - a time of arbitrary royal power, a wealthy transnational Church, and religious controversy. Not a time, perhaps, we associate with the...

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...

1930s Britain by Robert Pearce, Shire Living Histories, 2010, paperback, 80 pp, £8.99, ISBN 9780747807797This slim, attractively produced and extensively illustrated paperback with numerous sepia and full colour illustrations offers a handy guide to how we worked, played and lived in the thirties, a decade sometimes morbidly characterised, as the...

24 Hours at Balaclava: 25 October 1854, Robert Kershaw, The History Press, 2019, 286p, £20-00. ISBN 9780750988889. Robert Kershaw’s review of what happened at Balaclava in October 1854 is part of an emerging genre of research. He has examined vast quantities of written sources which together give a strong sense...

30-Second Ancient Greece, Matthew Nicholls, (ed.), Ivy Press, Lewes, 2016, hardback, £14.99, ISBN 9781782403883 This compact, strikingly designed, authoritative text by a team of authors under the leadership of Dr Matthew Nicholls, an ancient historian based at the University of Reading, sets out to distil the essence of the history...

50 Finds from Staffordshire: Objects from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, Teresa Gilmore, Amberley, 2018, 96p, £14-99. ISBN 978-1-4456-7548-0. Teresa Gilmore’s book is valuable at three levels. Her 50 Finds from Staffordshire provides a very helpful insight into archaeological discoveries within Staffordshire, largely over the last ten years, all reported to...

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...

Radical Religion in Cromwell's England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth, Andrew Bradstock (I.B. Tauris, London and New York, 2011) xxvi, 189pp., paperback, £15.99, hardback, £52.50, ISBN 978 1 84551 7658 (paper), 978 1 8451 1 764 1(hard). The dozen illustrations in...

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...

A Handbook for History Teachers, James A. Duthie, University Press of America, New York and Plymouth UK, paperback, x + 302 pp ISBN 9780761859901. Although James A. Duthie was born in Edinburgh and earned an MA in history from the University of Edinburgh, he trained as a teacher at Victoria...

Free Parks for the People: A History of Birmingham's Municipal Parks 1844-1974, Carl Chinn, Brewin Books, 2012, 160p, paperback. ISBN 978-1-85858-495-9. £14-95.Even people who have strong affinity with Birmingham will find what Carl Chinn reveals in his ‘Free Parks for the People' to be an extraordinary story. That Birmingham is...

E.H. Carter and RAF Mears, A History of Britain. The Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution 1714-1832, Stacey International, 2010, hardback, 259pp, £10.00, ISBN 9781906768249This volume is the fifth volume of a ten-part publishing programme dealing with British history from the Celts to the twenty-first century scheduled for completion...

A History of Britain: The Normans, Magna Carta and the Black Death, E. H. Carter and R.A.F. Mears, ed. David Evans, (Stacey International, London, 2010, original edition, Clarendon Press, 1937)  296pp., hardback £10.00, ISBN 978 1 906768 36 2 This long admired but latterly forgotten series was written by Carter,...

A History of Women in 100 Objects, Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas, The History Press, 2018, 350pp., £20 paper, ISBN 978-0-7509-6714-3 The history of the world has been told in objects and the past decade has seen a growing number of books. But what about the objects that tell the history of...

A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime and the Nigerian Civil War, Samuel Fury Childs Daly, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 272p, £75-00. ISBN 978-1-108-84076-7. More than fifty years ago, a south-eastern portion of Nigeria attempted to break away and declared itself the Republic of Biafra. It is usually...

A History of the World in 100 Weapons, Chris McNab, Osprey Publishing, 2011, £25, 384 pages, ISBN 978-1-84908-520-5.The BBC and Neil McGregor may have had great success with "History of the World in 100 Objects" but Osprey Publishing has done Chris McNab no favours in giving this book a similar...

A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610, R, Po-Chia Hsia (Oxford University Press, 2012, first published in hardback, 2010) xvi, 359pp., paperback, £40.00, ISBN 978 0 19 959225 8 (hardback), £19.99, ISBN 978 0 19 965653 0 (paperback)The author is known and respected as an expert on the...

A Passion for History: Conversations with Denis Crouzet - Natalie Zemon Davis(Truman State University Press), 2010 218pp., $24.95, paper, ISBN 978-1-931112-97-0Natalie Zemon Davis is one of the leading historians of early modern society and culture perhaps best known for her classic The Return of Martin Guerre.  Her work is innovative...

A Sense of Occasion: Mendelssohn in Birmingham in 1846 and 1847, Audrey Duggan, Brewin Books, 2011, 102p, ISBN 978-1-85858-449-2, £10-95.It is often the case that the provision of a particular building or an important cultural occasion or, indeed, the visit of an international figure creates a defining moment in the...

A Short History of Atheism, Gavin Hyman (I. B. Taurus, London and New York, 2010) xx, 212pp., paperback, £14.99, ISBN 978 1 84885 137 5, hardback, £49.50, ISBN 978 1 84885 136 8.Gavin Hyman, Lecturer in Religious Studies at Lancaster and a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Atheism (2006),...