Newest History Reviews
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The Story of India by Michael Wood
I somehow managed to miss Michael Wood's television series on The Story of India. Even more unforgivably, given the prominent BBC Books logo on the cover, I failed to realise that this book was published to accompany the series.
If neither of those things were true, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it much more than I did. Coming to it as purely as a stand-alone book, I found that it really didn't engage me anywhere near as much as I'd hoped and anticipated. Full review...
How to Research Local History by Pamela Brooks
Find out all about your house, village or town, the subtitle of this book announces. In my view, it tells you much more than that. For any historian, and not just in the field of purely local studies, this volume is probably as near to indispensable as they come. Full review...
Return to the Middle Kingdom by Yuan-Tsung Chen
Yuan-Tsung Chen's family have lived through momentous times in China and been as close to what was happening as any one family could be. Chen Guixin, born in 1830 in the time of the Manchu government and just before the beginning of the Opium Wars was her husband's grandfather. He was a part of the Taiping Rebellion but it was his son, Chen Youren who was hailed as a hero when he marched into two former British concessions and reclaimed the land for China. He was the first foreign minister of modern China to have taken back land from the colonial powers. The author married Chen Youren's son, the journalist and artist Jack Chen, who was arrested by the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution and who later continued his work in the USA. Full review...
Bedlam: London and Its Mad by Catharine Arnold
At the very least, this book is a salutary reminder that every time we read or hear anything about mental health issues, or care in the community, our ancestors used to talk about madness and disease – the two often being inseparable. For hundreds of years, even less than a century ago, people suffering from no more than acute depression were treated in a manner which sounds horrific today. Full review...
King's Mistress, Queen's Servant: Henrietta Howard by Tracy Borman
Henrietta Howard, later Countess of Suffolk, is probably one of the least remembered of royal mistresses. Given that her royal lover was one of the least-remembered of British sovereigns, was not wicked or horrible enough to be that infamous and therefore that interesting, and was one of the much-maligned Hanoverians to boot, this is hardly surprising. Full review...
Shadows Of The Workhouse: The Drama Of Life In Postwar London by Jennifer Worth
The Workhouse. What does that make you think of? Dickens probably. Pictures of grimy people in 1800s unable to fend for themselves, ending up destitute and scared and carted off to the workhouse. The very fact that we use those words carted off implies an inescapable fate. No-one was ever carted to the workhouse. They walked in or crawled. But it did have a ring of finality about it, a fate every bit as terminal as a revolution tumbrel. Full review...
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King by Ian Mortimer
Kings of England, at least those prior to King Henry VIII, seem on the whole a shadowy crowd. They come half-alive through our knowledge of occasional legends, battles fought (and preferably won), and characterisations in Shakespeare's plays, yet still seem oddly remote and two-dimensional. Full review...
Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys by Neil Oliver
I was so excited by the prospect of reading this book: a large format (6"x12") hardback that promised real life, action adventure stories. From the cover, it reminded me of the non fiction I loved to read myself in my latter, pre-teenage years. The title gave an implicit promise of what was going to be delivered in the book, and if only it could have been left at that, this book might have had a fair chance; unfortunately, Neil Oliver isn't employing hyperbole in the book's title. Full review...
Bristol Murders by Nicola Sly
Murder is such a horribly commonplace crime that the annals of any major centre of population must be teeming with cases of violent, often premeditated death over the years. Domestic incidents that went out of control, drunkenness and sheer greed were often the reason. This survey of 30 cases in Bristol between 1741 and 1957 suggests that, no matter what else may have changed over two centuries and more, human nature basically alters but little. Full review...
Chopin's Funeral by Benita Eisler
How is Frederic Chopin best remembered today – as one of the leading composers of his time, or as a sickly man who endured an unhappy affair with a man-eating lady novelist and was fated not to survive middle age? Full review...
One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Krushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs
At the end of October 1962 the world held its breath as three Presidents – Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro – brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war, but somehow managed to back away from almost certain disaster. The story begins on Tuesday October the 16th and takes us through to the point at the end of the month when we all realised that what to eat for our next meal need not be the extent of our forward planning. Full review...
A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr
If this had not been written by one of the best-known journalists and commentators working today, I'd have had my doubts about the title. Sure, the book is what it says on the cover, though a rather dry academic designation like that might put off the more general reader. Full review...
Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop
On her first trip to the orient Fuchsia Dunlop is appalled at the preserved duck eggs served as hors d'oeuvre in Hong Kong. Her description of this first encounter with the Chinese delicacy is rich with words like filthy, revolting, nightmarish, translucent, oozy, mouldy, toxic, slime… Full review...
Clara's War by Clara Kramer
This WW2 memoir of a 15-year-old Jewish girl in Poland, hidden with her family in a damp, cramped bunker under the floorboards of a house occupied by a man believed to be a virulent anti-Semite, draws inevitable comparisions with The Diary of Anne Frank. Four families endure terrible hardship while hiding from the Nazis; Clara Kramer kept a diary of their lives, recording their gruelling existence and daily terror of discovery. This book is based on those diaries, from her perspective sixty years later. Full review...
A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire by Nicholas Murray
The British Empire, lawd bless it – so large the sun never set on it. Also never resting upon its surface, if this book is anything to go by, was an increasing spread of the moneyed classes, gallivanting off to all corners, whether as imperial missionaries, explorers, or just plain travellers. Full review...
The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer
In The Bloody White Baron we meet the memorable and terrifying character of Baron Ungern, or to give him his full birth name, Nikolai Roman Maximilian Ungern-Sternberg, born four years before Hitler in 1885 and sharing many of the same characteristics – charisma, an overwhelming sense of vision, great military bravery, contempt for the opinion of others, teetotal (though Ungern was addicted to opium), asceticism, rabid anti-Semitism and a strong sense of personal superiority. Austrian-born to German parents, Ungern's aristocratic upbringing in Estonia, his love of horsemanship and military life drew him to a troubled career in the Russian military, with a finale as leader of a cavalry army in Mongolia, funded from his own purse and rampant looting. He was proud of his warlike ancestors, who bore names like 'the Axe' and 'Brother of Satan'; his great-great-grandfather was a shipwrecker and bandit. His father was subject to violent rages, resulting in five years in a mental institution; his parents divorced when Ungern was six. Full review...
The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes by Stephen Robinson
Bill Deedes holds the distinction of being, so far, the only person in Britain to be at different times both a cabinet minister and editor of a national newspaper. A remarkably packed life as a journalist – it is that career, rather than his political one, for which he will be remembered most – saw him as a close observer of several world issues, from the Abyssinian war in the 1930s to the Darfur crisis of the 21st century. Full review...
Blue China by Bamboo Hirst
An intriguing memoir of a half-Chinese, half-Italian woman, and of her parents who meet prior to the outbreak of World War II. Full review...
The Bridge by Geert Mak
The current Galata Bridge in Instanbul is a concrete structure less than 15 years old. A bascule bridge of some 490m, it carries a four-lane highway, a tramway and pedestrian walkways on its open upper deck with arcaded market areas beneath on the outer spans. At first sight it has little to recommend it. None of the grandeur of the Charles Bridge in Prague, nor the ostentation of Tower Bridge in London, nor even the elegance of the Golden Gate. Full review...
I Wish I'd Been There: Twenty Historians Revisit Key Moments in History by Byron Hollinshead and Theodore K Rabb (editors)
This collection of historic essays from twenty historians, including Tom Holland, John Julius Norwich and John Keegan, is based on the question, What is the moment in history that you would like to have witnessed and why?.
Generally, historians implicitly inhabit moments in time, but this exercise requires them to do so explicitly. In taking the stance of a witness to these events, often in circumstances where vital information is missing or ambiguous, these historians attempt to look afresh at often vital moments of world history. Full review...
A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain by Marc Morris
Marc Morris is another one of those Oxbridge-educated academic broadcasters - we like them lots, don't we? He presented the Channel 4 series Castle a couple of years back and it was a great favourite hereabouts. So he has all the right credentials for armchair historians like me. I was really looking forward to his book on Edward I, Longshanks, the long-lived medieval king who conquered Wales and Scotland, pacified a civil war, went on Crusade and, infamously, expelled the Jews. I wasn't disappointed. Full review...
Our Longest Days: A People's History of the Second World War by Sandra Koa Wing
In 1936 the King of England abdicated. Such a thing had never been heard of…that he should do so for love made it all the more a newspaper editor's wet-dream of a story. It was probably the biggest thing in court circles since the last apocalyptic royal romance back in the 1500s. Whether the editors envisaged a similar mini-series evolving isn't recorded. What they did 'envisage' however – and reported in depth and at length – was what the British public thought of the whole affair. Full review...
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
If Hitler was the most evil person in history within our generation, Stalin ran him a close second. Yet as this biography of the latter's early years shows, he was a complex man of many facets. Born Josef Djugashvili in poverty in 1878 and known as Soso during his childhood, he was the only surviving child of his parents' marriage – if one chooses not to believe the rumours that he was born on the wrong side of the wedding ring to his promiscuous mother. His (presumed) father was a hard drinker who beat his wife and child. At 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox Seminary of Tiflis, Georgia, where he wrote poetry, sang in the choir and at weddings – and became involved in the Marxist movement. Full review...
Anonymity by John Mullan
A scholarly look at the reasons why authors throughout the ages have chosen to remain anonymous. Full review...
Blood River by Tim Butcher
Tim Butcher started working as a journalist in Africa in 2000…15 years after Live Aid gave us all hope that maybe the continent’s problems were solvable…and almost as long since we’d begun to realise that it wasn’t going to be that easy.
Two years into the bloodiest war in the world, the Congo – at the very heart of Africa – was seeing 1,000 deaths a day to the violence. And the world wasn’t even looking. Full review...
