==History==
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{{newreview
|author=Giles Milton
|title=Wolfram: The Boy Who Went To War
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Giles Milton's daughter was set the task of designing an heraldic shield which represented the most important elements of her family's history. Aware that one of her grandparents is German she included the only German symbol which she knew: a Swastika. It was this incident, which was an awkward mixture of funny and disquieting which brought about 'Wolfram: The Boy Who Went To War'. It's the story of Giles' father-in-law, Wolfram Aïchele, who was nine years old when Hitler came to power and who found himself caught up in a situation which was none of his making and didn't accord with his own beliefs. He was a man who wanted to be a sculptor or to paint, but he was forced to become a soldier.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340837888</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dudley Green
|summary=Consider taking a five day sail in a small fishing boat the height of the North Sea from Shetland, to try and establish, train and supply some potentially vital anti-German resistance in the far, far north of occupied Norway, your homeland. Imagine the sight of heavy naval parades where you intended to land, as galling proof that your intel is ages out of date. Ponder too the fact that you get reported to the Nazis due to the most ridiculous slight of fortune. All your colleagues are dead or captured, your equipment blown up with your trawler to keep it safe from Jerry hands, half your big toe has been shot off, and you're forced to go on the run in one of Europe's last, and coldest, wildernesses. And you have no idea whatsoever quite how bad this scenario is going to get.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847678459</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Norman Rose
|title=A Senseless Squalid War: Voices From Palestine 1890s - 1948
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=The reappearance of ''A Senseless, Squalid War'' in paperback will afford wider access to the balanced and detailed scholarship of Prof Norman Stone. This is a sad story of the Palestinian Mandate retold through the viewpoints of politicians and proponents; Arab, Jewish, British, French, German and American. It energetically conveys an understanding of the character of figures as disparate as David Ben Gurion, Richard Crossman, Haj Amin and David Lloyd George. Organisations, conferences and sticking points are deftly expounded. It does not lose sight the overarching motives and machinations of International Politics.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845950798</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Addison
|title=No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=In the opening chapter Addison, a child of the 1940s, starts by comparing the leaders of the peacetime administrations that did most to change the face of Britain after 1945. The first, Clement Attlee, was a modest, unassuming, even uncharismatic personality, yet he still led a genuinely radical and reforming government. As the second, his admirer Margaret Thatcher, would point out in her memoirs, not only did he achieve a great deal, but he did so because of, or perhaps despite, being all substance and no show.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192192671</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Green
|title=Murder in the High Himalaya
|rating=4.5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=The Himalayan mountains mean many things to different people. To the people of Tibet, trapped under the atheist occupiers from China, who ran the Dalai Lama out in the 1950s in their consuming urge for lebensraum and mineral mining, they are a near-impenetrable barrier, protecting their country from history's prior ravages, but keeping people who want out, very much in. To rich Westerners, they are a sparkling challenge - a task of the highest order, a box to tick on the way to self-fulfilment - something to be climbed, because they're there.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1586487140</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Brian W Pugh, Paul R Spiring and Sadru Bhanji
|title=Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and Devon: A Complete Tour Guide and Companion
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=''The Hound of the Baskervilles'' is one of the most famous mystery novels of all, and also one of the most famous English novels set in Devon. This alone would probably give more or less enough material for an entire book on connections between the story and the location which inspired it. Yet the authors have found several more links between the county, and Conan Doyle alongside those associated with him. The result has revealed much information of which even I, who have lived in the county nearly all my life, was previously unaware.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1904312861</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jenny Diski
|title=The Sixties
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=In the last few years, there have been many books of varying length about the 60s. Most of them are relatively self-contained histories of the decade, often fairly liberal in adopting their signposts as to when the era began and ended. (Blame Philip Larkin's famous poem for the confusion, I hear you say).
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846680042</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Charlotte Moore
|title=Hancox
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Hancox is the large imposing house in rural Sussex where Charlotte Moore was brought up, and where she still lives. Although its origins are not fully documented, according to local records it certainly existed by the mid-15th century, its name probably derived from that of John Handcocks, one of the early owners. In what is basically part family history and part biography of the house itself, the author traces its story back to lawyer John Dounton, the first owner about whom nothing substantial is known, who made extensive alterations to it in 1569. It then passed through the hands of several families until her ancestors acquired it in 1888. In 1900 one of them let it to the Church of England Temperance Society as a drying-out house for 'inebriates', but the arrangement was terminated in 1907 and the family moved back in.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670915866</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Frances Woodsford
|title=Dear Mr Bigelow: A Transatlantic Friendship
|rating=4
|genre=Autobiography
|summary=Meet Mister Bigelow. He's elderly, living alone on Long Island, New York, with some health problems but more than enough family and friends to get him by, and still a very active interest in yachting, regattas and more. Meet, too, Frances Woodsford. She's reaching middle-age, living with her brother and mum in Bournemouth, and working for the local baths as organiser of events, office lackey and more. I suggest you do meet them, although neither ever met the other. Despite this they kept up a brisk and lively conversation about all aspects of life, from the late 1940s until his death at the beginning of the 60s. And as a result comes this book, of heavily edited highlights, which opens up a world of social history and entertaining diary-style comment.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099542293</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Ackroyd
|title=Venice: Pure City
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=Among Peter Ackroyd's recent works are 'biographies' of London and of the river Thames. Now he gives similar treatment to Venice, basically a history but enlivened with his elegant, literary style, and what a previous reviewer has called his love of 'psychogeographical investigation'.x
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099422565</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Benedict Gummer
|title=The Scourging Angel: The Black Death in the British Isles
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=The mid-fourteenth century was an unsettled time for England. It was an age which saw the first phases of the protracted Hundred Years’ War with France, and the Scottish war of independence, which came to an end with the capture of King David II. As if these events were not enough, in 1346 there was the first case of a man in Europe contracting an unknown disease that rapidly swept across the continent, claiming the lives of millions, and one medieval chronicler noted that 'the bodies looked like a macabre lasagne: corpses piled row upon row separated only by layers of dirt'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099548836</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mary Beard
|title=The Parthenon
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Despite the proliferation of populist historians in print and on television, Professor Mary Beard continues to be a voice apart. Her conversational style of writing belies the academic research at its heart. This is serious history written as engagingly as a detective story.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846683491</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Beaumont
|title=The Secret Life of War: Journeys Through Modern Conflict
|rating=5
|genre=Politics and Society
|summary=Peter Beaumont is the Foreign Affairs editor at The Observer. He joined the paper in 1989 and has spent much of the intervening time dealing with the kind of 'foreign affairs' that is better described as 'war reporting'. 'The Secret Life of War' is a distillation of his years in the field. It is a book ill-served by both its title and its cover, except maybe insofar as both might serve to sneak it onto the bookshelves of those who really need to read it, but probably wouldn't choose to do so were it more accurately wrapped.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099520982</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nick Barratt
|title=Lost Voices from the Titanic: The Definitive Oral History
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=As Barratt points out in the opening pages, there are literally thousands of titles available about the sinking of the Titanic, at the time the largest, most expensive and most luxurious ship ever built. His aim in this volume is to bridge the gap between another forensic examination of how it sank, and yet another re-run of what he calls the familiar stories of heroism and tragedy from literature in the public domain to provide the human story behind the disaster.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848091516</amazonuk>
}}
