Newest History Reviews
History
The Spirit of Venice: From Marco Polo to Casanova by Paul Strathern
There are several ways of telling the history of the republic of Venice, which is generally regarded as the first great economic and naval power of the western world. Strathern has chosen to do so largely through the lives of various famous (and also infamous) people from Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century to what he calls its destruction, 'both political and symbolic', at the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. On the whole, the major events such as its wars are covered fairly briefly. An exception, fittingly enough, is made in the case of a chapter on the war which began its decline in the fifteenth century, when it tried to hold Thessalonica against the Ottomans, and sent ships to help defend Constantinople against the Turkish army but found itself heavily defeated in the subsequent lengthy war, as a result of which it lost most of its possessions. Full review...
The Great War by Peter Hart
There are certain aspects of world history that we are duty-bound to teach to each generation. World War I was called 'The Great War' for a reason; it changed the world scene irrevocably and is regarded as the single most important event of the twentieth century. The war introduced dreadful new weapons designed to slaughter as many people as possible with maximum efficiency, resulting in tens of millions of deaths. Full review...
Made to last: The story of Britain's best-known shoe firm by Mark Palmer
From its founding by the Quaker brothers Cyrus and James Clark in the Somerset village of Street, to its present-day status as a global shoe brand, the name of Clark has weathered many a storm as it draws close to its bicentenary. This account of the company, by a distant kinsman of the two original founders, has drawn heavily on the archives and on in-depth interviews with the family to tell the full story. Full review...
Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours by Emily Cockayne
As Emily Cockayne emphasises at the beginning of the first chapter, almost everyone has a neighbour; if you have a neighbour, you are one yourself; and neighbours can enrich or ruin our lives. In this engaging book, she takes various case studies and anecdotes of living side by side in Britain from around 1200 to the present day. Full review...
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer
For many of us, the Elizabethan age which comprised almost half of the Tudor era seems bathed in sunlight, the gilded era of Queen Elizabeth's 'sceptred isle'. It was the period in which Gloriana presided over Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the literary epoch of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney. Full review...
Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder
In emulating historians from his geographical area of interest, Timothy Snyder poses questions to, and discusses ideas with, the highly esteemed British historian and writer Tony Judt, best known for his 2005 Postwar. This collaboration of the older and the younger thinker engenders the spoken book Thinking the Twentieth Century, a rather intriguing exploration of said time period. Each of its ten chapters begins with Judt’s narrative of a specific point in his personal life, and continues into debates of specific facets of history; a healthy mix of thematic and chronological approaches is used for the latter. Full review...
Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by Cathryn J Prince
There is no pun intended when I describe the ship Wilhelm Gustloff as stern. It just seems from looking at her hard and rigid lines that if you were to design a ship that the Nazi party would use as an ideological tool, to take their favoured workers on pleasure cruises around the Mediterranean, you would naturally end up with something that looked like her. However fate had it that within years she became a hospital ship, and it wasn't much longer after that that she was stationed in the northern Polish port now known as Gdynia, ready to help in a major evacuation of thousands of desperate, starving and fevered people fleeing the advancing Soviet army. All they wanted to do was to avoid the perilous snowy overland route to get a few miles along the coast, but they weren't to know that within hours of sailing the Wilhelm Gustloff would be torpedoed, and many thousands would perish in the near-frozen Baltic waters. Full review...
The First Crusade: The Call from the East by Peter Frankopan
At the now famous Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II responded to calls of distress from the eastern Byzantine Empire by issuing the dramatic call to arms that sparked the First Crusade. But there are at least two sides to every story, especially in history. Western histories of the Crusades have concentrated on that Council and the journeys of Crusaders across Europe: Peter Frankopan's 'The Call from the East' instead draws attention to Emperor Alexios I Komnenus and the plight of his Byzantine Empire. Full review...
Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
A good historian will take a single important fact and make good use of it to expound his general thesis. De Bellaigue demonstrates this masterfully when he states, 'Between 1876 and 1915 a quarter of the world changed ownership, with a half a dozen European states taking the lion’s share.' Persia, however, during this time was judged to be too poor to be worth occupying. It had, for instance, only a few miles of railway track. Secondly, Russia and Britain both had schemes for control but their mutual animosity gave the Persians room for manoeuvre. The latter were skilled at playing each off against the other and obtaining concessions. However, the conflict sharpened over the control of a critical resource, oil. This was controlled upon the outbreak of the First World War by the major share held in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later to become BP, held by the British. It was Muhammad Mossadegh, one of the first liberals of the Middle East was determined that this resource beneath his native land had to belong to his own people. Full review...
The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris
When did the Norman conquest of England start and end? This generous panoramic history takes a wide sweep of almost the whole of the eleventh century in England, although as the title indicates, the focal point is that pivotal date of 1066. Morris begins his narrative at around the year 1000, a time when the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were under threat from the Viking invasions from Alfred and Ethelred the Unready. Having long been vulnerable to raids from Scandinavia, England then had to contend with the same from France. The power struggles that followed the illness and death of the childless Edward the Confessor (who had nominated William of Normandy as his preferred successor in 1051), the apparent seizure of the English throne by Harold Godwinson who then had himself crowned with remarkable haste, the invasion led by Harold’s brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada of Norway and the death of both the latter at Stamford Bridge, are dealt with in painstaking detail. Full review...
London in the 18th century by Jerry White
White has already written accounts of London in the 19th and 20th centuries, and this is the last in a planned trilogy. In 1700, according to an unnamed contemporary source, it was one of the ‘most Spacious, Populous, Rich, Beautiful, Renowned and Noble Citys that we know of at this day in the World’. It was also the largest city in Europe. By the end of the century, it would double in extent and population, and become the largest in the universe. Carl Phillipp Moritz, a visitor from Germany in 1782, could climb St Paul's Cathedral and comment with amazement that he found it impossible to ascertain where London began or ended, ‘or where the circumjacent villages began; far as the eye could reach, it seemed to be all one continued chain’. Full review...
The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story by Catherine Fletcher
Henry VIII’s protracted divorce from Catherine of Aragon, often referred to as ‘The King’s Great Matter’, has been described in detail many times before. In this book on the subject, the focus is on the role of Italian diplomat, Gregorio Casali, ‘our man in Rome’, as the hardback edition was titled. In the preface, Ms Fletcher explains that the average reader may be conversant with the basic facts of Henry and his six wives, but has probably never heard of Casali, who played a lengthy role in the proceedings. Full review...
Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes by Pam Weaver
In 1961, a young 16 year old girl called Pam Weaver embarks on a career path that will change her life. Fed up with the tedium of working on the broken biscuit counter at Woolworths, she decides to train for her NNEB. Bath Times and Nursery Rhymes sees Pam progress from a shy and awkward teenager to a competent and caring nursery nurse. Reluctant to stay too long in any position, Pam tries her hand at a variety of jobs, including her initial employment in a Council-run children’s home, working as a private nanny to a rich young widow and an eventful but emotional stint in a premature baby ward. Full review...
Birds in a Cage by Derek Niemann
Birds in a Cage introduces the reader to John and his fellow officers: Peter Conder, George Waterston and John Henry Barrett and shows how their shared love of birds enabled them to create an emotional escape from the gruelling conditions that surrounded them in the prisoner of war camp at Warburg. The men banded together to form a birdwatching society within the camp, making meticulous observations of the lives of the birds nesting in and around the area. These detailed records went on to become valuable scientific documents, as they recorded the lives and habits of birds in painstaking detail, revealing previously unknown facts about species such as the redstart and goldfinch. Full review...
The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick
It's been said that history is written by the victors. It would also be pertinent to add that the writing will always polish up the worthy parts whilst whilst finding a convenient carpet under which can be swept the events which are best forgotten. There's no country with a victory under its belt which is above this practice: I've just been brought up very sharply as I considered the Irish potato famine from the Irish perspective. That's a story you'll not read in many British history books. The majority of British people would accept though that their country has had an imperialist past - and that the natives have not always thrown themselves down in front of us in their joy at our arrival. Full review...
One Bloody Thing After Another by Jacob F Field
While other authors have made the case for mankind easing off in the destruction stakes recently, and becoming less hostile, bloodthirsty and cruel than in the past, it doesn’t mean that our global history is not littered with detail, about mutinies, massacres and murders. Mr Field here gathers the gamut of gore from the time when the only people writing down their history were the Chinese, up until the late nineteenth century, and covers the planet in search of slicing, dicing and deathly devices. It certainly lives up to its title. Full review...
When the Earth Was Flat by Graeme Donald
Mankind has often had some quite ridiculous ideas. Once upon a time people deemed it sensible for doctors to go from an autopsy room to help give birth without washing hands in between – who'd have thought it might be beneficial? Those self-same medical scientists were within generations going to extol the virtues of cocaine and opium as harmless boosts to medicine, and in the interim proudly induce enemas of tobacco smoke – the early version of colonic irrigation so beloved of some dodgy ex-Princess-type people. Outside the medical room, there was once the notion that the Earth was flat – although not as might be popularly believed, a regular idea in Columbus's days, but certainly at times before then. The spread of man's idiocy where wrong, faulty and dodgy science is concerned, and the history of all the false ideas, is touched on in this fascinating volume. Full review...
The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy by Tim Pat Coogan
The great famine of Ireland in the 1840s was a major disaster and a tragedy. As a result, about a million of its citizens died from starvation and a further million emigrated, with so many perishing en route that it was said you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies. The net total was about a quarter of the existing population. Yet as Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan argues in this account, the famine was more than a tragedy. The title indicates a fierce polemic, and the thrust of his book is that the British government of the day was not merely responsible for exacerbating the famine conditions through mismanagement and failure to respond adequately to the failure of the potato crop, but in fact deliberately engineered a food shortage in what was one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. Full review...
