Newest History Reviews
Mythology: An Illustrated Journey Into Our Imagined Worlds by Christopher Dell
What does a rainbow mean to you? How would you explain the creation of the world if you had no science as such, or the changing of the seasons? What other kinds of natures – chaotic trickery, evil personae or even the characteristics of goats – people your world? And why is it that the answers man and woman have collectively formed to such questions have been so similar across the oceans and across the centuries? This highly pictorial volume looks at the mythologies that formed those answers, and locks on to a multitude of subjects – blood, music, godly activity – to show us what has followed. Full review...
Village of Secrets by Caroline Moorehead
Village of Secrets is an account of resistance (with a small 'r') and rescue in a series of small villages scattered across the Vivarais-Lignon plateau in Vichy France. Residents of these villages harboured a number of people, many of them children, many of them Jews, seeking to avoid deportation to concentration camps, at great personal risk. There have been other accounts of this chapter in French history and, of course, a great many books about Vichy France in general. However, Village of Secrets is, perhaps, the most detailed, much of it based on primary sources (interviews with both rescuers and the rescued, or their families), backed up by extensive documentary research. Full review...
The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee
One of the many things to come out of this incredibly clear and readable book is that we Brits, for all our literary heritage, have got nothing like an equivalent to Boris Pasternak. He or she would have to sell like Rowling, regularly capture the enjoyment and spirit of the nation a la Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremonies, and at the same time have the cultural heft of Larkin, Rushdie, Graham Greene and more combined. Someone connected with choosing recipients of the Nobel Prize declare him here to be the Soviet TS Eliot, but that's nothing like. So the reader probably has to stretch herself to see someone so well-respected and well-loved for his verse, who spent twelve years and more on a huge, society-defining novel, only for the country to nix every plan to get it published. Full review...
Hitler's Forgotten Children: My Life Inside the Lebensborn by Ingrid von Oelhafen and Tim Tate
You see that name that credits the author of this book? Forget it, it's not accurate. (I don't mean Tim Tate's workmanlike, journalistic ghost writing, more of which later.) The narrator of this book did change her name by deed poll to something like Ingrid von Oelhafen some time ago, but not exactly how she wanted. She grew up as Ingrid von Oelhafen, although that was the name of her father, who was so desperately absent, in being over a generation older than his wife, with whom he was separated. She might well have had her mother's maiden name if her parents had divorced – and indeed her mother did move on to have a second family, and was terribly distant herself – young Ingrid would plead and plead for her company while in a remote children's home, and a lot of family secrets were not passed down at opportune times. Oh, and legally, due to what little documentation was to be seen, such as immunisation record cards, Ingrid was not Ingrid at all, but Erika Matko. Through this book, we find she was not blood-kin with her brother, her step-brother was to die, she was not blood-kin with her sister, but was her brother's, – oh, and even in this day and age you can still find a changeling foundling. Such incredibly convoluted family trees are the fault of the Lebensborn. Full review...
Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History by Francis O'Gorman
‘’Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History’’ begins with a familiar scene for anyone who experiences that persistent feeling of fretful panic: lying awake in the early hours, unable to switch off, thoughts turning over in your head. If this common situation hits home, ‘This book’, its author Francis O’Gorman writes, ‘is for you.’ Full review...
The Seymours of Wolf Hall: A Tudor Family Story by David Loades
In medieval times Wolf Hall or Wolfhall (or even Wulfhall), the long-since-demolished family seat in Wiltshire, was the home of the Seymour family. Their greatest triumph, followed by a speedy decline and fall, was part of Tudor history, and is thus the focus of this book. Full review...
The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking World by Philip Parker
In AD793, the Vikings arrived on our shores. Bringing death and destruction, they sacked the island monastery of Lindisfarne. Bloodthirsty warriors, they soon descended on northern Europe. However, for all their reputation as terrible and brutal thugs, the Vikings possessed a culture that was far more sophisticated than they are often given credit for, producing art, literature and long lasting kingdoms. Philip Parker describes how these people came to rule over much of Europe for nearly three centuries, in this fascinating and intriguing read. Full review...
Mudlark River: Down the Thames with a Victorian Map by Simon Wilcox
Do you think finding a 19th century map would inspire you to walk the entire length of the Thames? Because that's what Simon Wilcox did. I think there's something impossibly romantic about that, don't you? Full review...
The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways by Michael Williams
Beaching wasn't the only buffer to the fate of various train lines of our land – it could have been sheer managerial incompetence, the birth of the package air holiday, or even road-builders' bloody-minded spite that served to bring down the end of the line. Yes, the fact you can easily pepper your words with idiom from the world of trains shows how important they have been over the last two hundred years, and this book is geared around that as well, if happily cliché-free. Our author takes us on a journey around various sites where train lines and elements of what once rode proudly upon them have been and gone. So grab a platform ticket (RIP) and see what class of journey we're travelling in. Full review...
Three Men and a Bradshaw by John George Freeman and Ronnie Scott (editor)
This book is quite the very time machine, and because of that some of its own history is needed in summary. A year or two ago, our presenter Shaun Sewell was buying some private documents from the descendants of John George Freeman, to complete a set of illustrated travel journals he'd met with when risking a punt on the first few at auction. He was intent on getting them published since finding them, and seemed to be the first person with that desire since they were first written in the 1870s. Back then they were well-written, educative and entertaining looks at the early days of the travel industry, when for example piers were novel(ty) ways for the rail companies to justify sending people to the ends of the country where previously there had been little for them to do. Here then is railwayana, travel and social history, all between two covers. So even if this doesn't find the perfectly huge audience of some books, it will certainly raise interest in many households. Full review...
Granada: The Light of Andalucia by Steven Nightingale
Don't expect (as I did) a Parrot-in-the-Pepper-Tree type collection of comedic mishaps and tales about the joys -- and perils -- of joining a new community. This is, more than anything, a history book, albeit one in which the writer's deep love of his adopted home (Granada and, more specifically, the Albayzín, the district he lives in), his family and his neighbours makes every sentence sparkle. Even better, it's a history book that assumes no knowledge on the part of the reader. Steven Nightingale covers centuries of events in Spain, describing them with clarity and in a typically engaging style. He starts with the Moorish occupation of Spain in 711 and ends post-Civil War. Despite its vast chronological span, the book is more than a dry recounting of events and dates. Yes, that information is there, as befits any good history book. But Steven Nightingale's focus is more on the effects of these historical events, and the achievements of the times, particularly the ongoing legacy of the Moorish occupation. He writes in detail about Arabic poetry, the timeless nature of love, developments in maths, science and the arts, geometry in tiling, and much more. Full review...
Waterloo: The Aftermath by Paul O'Keeffe
There have been several accounts of the battle of Waterloo and of the events that led up to it. But it is always interesting to discover a book which finds a different way of telling the tale, or in this case focusing more on what happened directly afterwards. Full review...
1864: The forgotten war that shaped modern Europe by Tom Buk-Swienty
The brief but bloody clash of arms between Denmark and Prussia which took place in 1864 has never been regarded as one of the major 19th century European wars, and I cannot recall having ever seen a single volume devoted to it so far. In this book, which forms the basis of a new TV drama series, Tom Buk-Swienty has done us a service in reminding us that it had a far greater political impact than we may have appreciated. Full review...
Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 by Jeremy Treglown
With Franco’s Crypt Jeremy Treglown has taken a highly charged subject – life in Spain under Franco – and placed it under what to some might appear a somewhat revisionist microscope. His aim appears to be twofold: to consider the nature of collective memory, particularly in the light of the exhumations of mass graves that commenced earlier this century, and, secondly, to examine – and celebrate - Spain’s cultural output during Franco’s years as dictator. Full review...
A Nazi in the Family: The Hidden Story of an SS Family in Wartime Germany by Derek Niemann
I'm sure someone somewhere has rewritten The Devil's Dictionary to include the following – family: noun; place where the greatest secrets are kept. The Niemann family is no exception. It was long known that grandfather Karl was in Germany during the Second World War, people could easily work that out from the family biography. Yet little was spoken of, apart from him being an office-bound worker, either in logistics or finance. Since the War two of three surviving siblings had relocated to the Glasgow environs, and there was even a family quip concerning Goebbels and Gorbals (family: noun; place where the worst things are spoken in the best way). What was a surprise to our author, and many of his relatives, was that things were a lot closer to the former than had been expected, for Karl was such an office worker – for the SS. With a lot of family history finally out of the closet of silent mouths, and with incriminating photographic evidence revealed in unlikely ways, the whole truth can be known. But this is certainly not just of interest to that one small family. Full review...
God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs
It goes almost without saying that sixteenth-century England, at the height of religious persecution, was a pretty perilous age. Queen Mary was notorious for the number of Protestants who were burnt at the stake for their beliefs during her five-year reign. A belief widely held by many (depending on your religion, as likely as not) was that during the forty-five years that ‘Good Queen Bess’ reigned, greater toleration held sway. This has recently been disproved beyond doubt by several historians, and this book likewise helps to underline the savagery towards Catholics that was endemic under her rule. Full review...
Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia by David Greene
It's no mistake that the cover of my edition of this book is a photo where the Trans-Siberian Railway is horizontal in the frame. It's well known for going east-west, left to right across the map of the largest country by far in the world. 9,288 kilometres from Moscow to the eastern stretches of Russia, it could only be a long, thin line across the cover, as it is in our imagination of it as a form of transport and a travel destination in its own right. So when this book mentions it as the spine or backbone of Russia a couple of times, that's got to be of a prone Russia – one lying down, not upright or active. David Greene, a stalwart of northern American radio journalism, uses this book to see just how active or otherwise Russia and Russians are – and finds their lying down to be quite a definite verdict, as well as a slight indictment. It's no mistake either for this cover to have people in the frame alongside the train carriages, for the people met both riding and living alongside the tracks of the Railway are definitely the ribs of the piece. Full review...
1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo by Stephen Bates
The idea of taking a pivotal year from the past and devoting a whole book to the theme, embracing political, social and military history, is a very interesting one. Stephen Bates did so successfully not long ago with ‘Two Nations: Britain in 1846’, and here he does the same again, taking a step three decades back. Full review...
The Diary of Lena Mukhina: A Girl's Life in the Siege of Leningrad by Lena Mukhina and Amanda Love Darragh (translator)
If life as a girl of school-leaving age is hard enough, think about it when you're stuck in a great city under a horrendous siege. Lena Mukhina's diary only covers half the 800-odd days the nightmare in Leningrad lasted, but so palpably singular were the circumstances that it feels like one is given the clearest insight into what it was like, courtesy of these pages. I've been there and never felt the ghost of the siege in the modern St Petersburg, anything like (for example) the ruination of Warsaw had lived on. But a dreadful time this was. At the peak times of Nazi oppression and aerial bombing, the city lost 2 or 3 residents' lives every minute of the day on average. The city was desperate for fuel, and food – and this is a place where it can – and does here – snow in June. Without giving too much of the diet away, it's notable that later on Lena dreams of having a menagerie of small animals to live with – but no dogs or cats. Full review...
Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War by Jerry White
It seems that only recently, with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War upon us, that historians have really looked thoroughly at the social history aspect and the effect it had on the population at home. Jerry White, who has already made a study of London over the last three centuries or so in previous titles, now turns his attention to life in the capital during those momentous four years. Full review...
The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making by David Esterly
Bouncing between his studio in upstate New York and the sites of various English sojourns, woodcarver David Esterly's seems to be an idyllic existence. Yet it's not all cosy cottages in the snow and watching geese and coyotes when he looks up from his workbench. There is an element of hard-won retreat from the trials of life in this memoir, but at the same time there is an argument for the essential difficulty of the artist's life. 'Carvers are starvers,' a wizened English carver once told him. Certainly there is no great fortune to be won from a profession as obscure as limewood carving, but the rewards outweigh the hard graft for Esterly. Full review...
Did We Meet on Grub Street? by Emma Tennant, Hilary Bailey and David Elliott
Essentially, the three authors (all of whom have long careers in the book industry) revel in the idea of being whining old curmudgeons who miss the good old days of publishing. This unashamed nostalgia provides the focus of the book and allows the writers to recount numerous anecdotes from their days in the publishing business. Whilst the primary audience for this book may well be students of creative writing and media studies, it also serves as an interesting exploration of an aspect of modern history: how a once-burgeoning industry is now a shell of its former self, much like a lot of manufacturing. Because of this, I was disappointed that no space was given to a consideration of how the rise of the e-book and Kindle has directly damaged both the sale of books and the potential for new books to be written (fewer real books sold = fewer financial advances paid to writers = fewer books written). Also, given the clear love of books as treasured artifacts, the dismissal of the Harry Potter phenomenon seems truculent, given the impetus the series gave to reading amongst both the young and adults. Full review...
The Prussian Princesses: The Sisters of Kaiser Wilhelm II by John Van der Kiste
Kaiser Wilhelm II is well known and not for the best of reasons and he's certainly over-shadowed his six younger siblings. John Van der Kiste's first biography was of his father, Kaiser Friedrich III and he has also written about Emperor Wilhelm II so he is well placed to write about the three youngest children Kaiser Friedrich and Victoria, Princess Royal. Originally he intended to write about Friedrich's second daughter, but it quickly became obvious that the most satisfying biography - for reader and author - would be a biography of Victoria, Sophie and Margaret, their mother's kleebatt or trio, as they were known. Full review...
MOD: From Bebop to Britpop, Britain's Biggest Youth Movement by Richard Weight
Mod is arguably a rather-overused term. First of all, there is the matter of establishing a precise definition. Modernism, which was soon abbreviated for convenience, began as the working-class movement of a newly affluent nation. Once the age of immediate post-war austerity was gone, the cult of a youth keen to shake off the drab conformity of life in 1950s Britain took hold. It was more than anything else an amalgam of American music and European fashions, beginning as a popular cult and gradually becoming a mainstream culture. Full review...
Massacre in Norway: The 2011 Terror Attack on Oslo and the Utoya Youth Camp by Stian Bromark and Hon Khiam Leong (translator)
Anders Behring Breivik was 32 when he both planted a van bomb in Oslo's central government district to hit out at what he thought was 'Cultural Marxism', which killed 8, then left for an island in a lake 24 miles away, where a notably political youth gathering was enjoying itself. He gunned down 69 people – more than one in ten of those at the camp – and wounded many scores more. He also spammed countless people with another of his projects, a lengthy manifesto declaring his ideas about Islamisation and what he saw as a pernicious multiculturalism ruining his country. His case was one of the more superlative events in modern Nordic history – as was the surprisingly lenient sentence for over 70 lives of just 21 years. This is, as you'd expect, one of the many books to result from the case. Full review...
Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter by Dan Jones
For what do we – and by courtesy of a lengthy timeline in history, would the Americans likewise – most likely owe thanks to a spigurnel? What is the most revered legal document in history, which sets out the rights of man – but also has time to talk about widows' rights, fish traps, and to be both sexist and to discuss the importance to people's estates to debts owed Jewish moneylenders? What will probably be the only notable historical experience of Britain in 1215, when we finally get diverted from thinking about WWI and discuss the 800 years of something else, even though the authority of no less than the Pope declared it null and void within ten weeks of its being finished? Full review...
Rush Hour by Iain Gately
Rush Hour.
500 Million commuters go through it every day, and it's hard to avoid - whether like me you're a jaded Londoner stuck in someone's armpit whilst attempting to read on a cramped tube, or trying to navigate busy country lanes in order to do the school run and get to work on time, we've probably all experienced it. But have you ever thought about the history of it? Full review...
Merchant Adventurers: The Voyage of Discovery that Transformed Tudor England by James Evans
We tend to associate the golden age of global navigation and exploration with the Elizabethan age and such luminaries as Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins. This book does us all a service in reminding us of the original pioneers, whom they overshadowed and who seem less well-remembered these days. Full review...
