Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived and Will Never Die by Alex Werner
It has been over 125 years since the first Sherlock Holmes story was written and since then, the character has been subject to countless interpretations on stage, screen and in literature. Such was the popularity of the famous detective, that his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, attempted on more than one occasion to 'free himself' from Holmes, the most notable example being his 'death' at Reichenbach Falls. Readers were most upset and Doyle eventually bowed to public pressure, reviving the eponymous hero for further adventures. In the years that followed, Holmes took on a life independent of his author, as his stories were adapted for stage and film. An unconcerned Doyle allowed free rein with the character, famously saying: 'You may marry or murder or do whatever you like with him.' Full review...
Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts by Tracy Borman
Gossip is as old as human nature, but generally harmless. It was a different matter in medieval times, when what might start as relatively innocuous tittle-tattle could breed suspicion, paranoia, and ultimately accusations against women and girls of witchcraft. More often than not, it would end in a horrible death by execution - drowning, strangulation on the gallows, or being burned alive. The unsavoury business of witchcraft trials in early seventeenth-century England was encouraged by King James I, who with his obsession with and knowledge of the black arts and his firm belief in the threat of demonic forces believed that witches had been responsible for fierce storms that had come close to drowning his future bride on her voyage by sea from Scotland to England. Full review...
Rest in Pieces by Bess Lovejoy
All sorts has happened to deceased famous people - stolen, sold, stuffed, etc. Bess Lovejoy has collected the fates of the celebrity deceased and tells them here - in a cracking little book that will be ideal as a stocking filler or small gift for those who enjoy slightly gruesome tales. Full review...
The Last Escaper by Peter Tunstall
The Last Escaper opens differently to many of the great escape biographies that were released soon after the war as it is told some 70 years later. Peter Tunstall was an RAF pilot who was shot down and spent many years as a Prisoner Of War across occupied Europe, including in Colditz. He lived through the war, but also lived through many decades of peace. Will these years of the relative quiet life lesson the tales of bravery and dare doing of the war? Of course not! Full review...
The Shop Girls by Elee Seymour
Heyworth's Department Store.
The chances are, you have never heard of it before. I know that I hadn't, before I picked up this book. And yet, there was a time, not so long ago, when everyone in Cambridge would have been familiar with Heyworth's, even if they couldn't afford to shop there themselves. Smaller than most department stores, it offered high-end fashion, childrenswear and millinery, with a staff of smiling, smartly-dressed sales assistants ready to cater to the customer's every whim. It seems sad that with the passing of generations, the very existence of the store seems to have slipped away from the collective consciousness; ask most people in Cambridge if they remember Heyworth's and the majority response would be negative. Full review...
Washington Journal: reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's downfall by Elizabeth Drew
In early August 1974 I was in what was then Yugoslavia. There was a group of us, all interested in the political news, but essentially cut off from the outside world apart from the previous day's English newspapers which arrived mid morning. It was on the 11th of August that one of our number dashed onto the beach yelling He's resigned. He's RESIGNED!!! No one had any need to ask who he was talking about. We'd all been following the news about Richard Nixon's doings and wrongdoings for a year, with no one certain that he would be forced out of office. The investigative journalism (oh, for the days when journalists uncovered rather than merely covered) was done by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, but some of the most insightful reportage came from Elizabeth Drew writing for The New Yorker. Full review...
Golden Parasol by Wendy Law-Yone
If you look her up Wendy Law-Yone is described as a Burmese-born American author. That Burmese-born American might be an accurate description of her current citizenship, but it barely hints at the ethnic mix of her heritage, nor of her personal closeness (through her father) to her original homeland's struggle for freedom and democracy. Full review...
The Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman
During this centenary year, we have seen many ways of telling the history of the conflict which broke out among the Great Powers of Europe and soon involved all four corners of the world. This volume, based on a recent ITV series of the same title, approaches it from an angle which I have not seen before. It follows the course of events over the four years through the letters, memoirs and diaries of about a dozen individuals as it presents their story against the background of fighting on the continental mainland, and of bereavement, shortages and more at home. Full review...
Elizabeth of York by Alison Weir
Elizabeth of York could have ruled England were she not a woman and were she not born in the fifteenth century. Oldest daughter of Edward IV, she was the heiress of the Yorkist dynasty after the death of Richard III at Bosworth (and her own younger brothers in the Tower of London). Henry VII, the first Tudor king and victor by conquest, had at best a tenuous claim to the English throne. He legitimised it by his marriage to Elizabeth and proclaimed it through the Tudor rose, that joining of the emblems of York and Lancaster. Elizabeth's marriage to Henry produced one of our most famous kings in Henry VIII. Full review...
A Broken World: Letters, diaries and memories of the Great War by Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf
Sebastian Faulks and Dr Hope Wolf have expertly brought together this far-reaching collection of memories, diaries, letters and postcards written during and after the First World War. While Faulks is the author of novels such as Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, Dr Hope Wolf is a research fellow in English at the University of Cambridge, whose doctoral research focused on archives at the Imperial War Museum. The combination of such a respected author, whose most famous (and arguably his best) novel is set in the First World War, and an academic whose expertise is the in the same area, means that this fascinating collection hits all the right notes. It's commemorative, poignant and very human. Full review...
The Greatest Escape: How one French community saved thousands of lives from the Nazis by Peter Grose
We've read it before and been grateful, and now we can read it again, and for the same reasons – educational, entertainment, moralistic – we can be grateful. We've probably all heard how one place or circumstance – most famously, Oscar Schindler's factory – led to a major underhand rescue operation to keep Jews from being the victims of the Final Solution in World War Two. This book is a further example, but one of a whole French district being complicit in helping defy the Nazi authorities. Centred around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the heart of southern France, a very rural community based around Huguenot Protestants with their own experiences of religious persecution decided en masse to act as shelter for a whole host of people – mostly children rescued from transit and internment camps elsewhere in France, and the Jewish victims of the Vichy government rules demanding they be stateless or, worse, victims of a certain one-way train ride. But beyond becoming an idyllic place to hide out in plain view, the towns and villages also conspired to actively export the Jews themselves – to places of safety. Full review...
The Mill Girls by Tracy Johnson
The Mill Girls is a collection of true stories based on interviews with women who worked at Lancashire's cotton mills during the war years. Leaving school at the tender age of 14, the girls were thrown headlong into the world of work, at a time when jobs were plentiful and the benefits culture we know today was non-existent. The choice was a simple one: work or starve. Conditions were harsh, the mills noisy, dangerous and dirty and pay was low. Despite this, many of the women look back at their time 'in mill' with warm fondness and nostalgia. Full review...
Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin
Occasionally books are not exactly what they seem. When I picked this up, read the blurb and began the contents inside, I was expecting a kind of biography or history of money through the ages. The opening chapter, a brief sketch of the economy of the Pacific island of Yap and how it worked, seemed to confirm this. It tells us how in the late nineteenth century Yap, east of the Philippine Islands, had an unwieldy coinage consisting of stone wheels around 12ft in diameter, called fei. The population did not carry these around, let alone own them like we possess pounds and pence, as they were part of a sophisticated system of credit management. Full review...
How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On: Real-life stories from the Home Front by Anton Rippon
My generation is now at saturation point with 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters and all the accompanying variations. So much so, I was surprised to learn from this book was that the now ubiquitous poster was never actually distributed. The poster had been planned as part of a campaign to raise morale, but after they were printed, the government felt it would have been seen as patronising, given that Britons were doing exactly that without the government message to bolster them up. Full review...
Tudor: The Family Story by Leanda de Lisle
With so many recent books published on various aspects of Tudor history, it becomes harder to find a new angle or approach to the subject. Leanda de Lisle has thus pulled off the almost-impossible. Her starting point is not the battle of Bosworth and Henry Tudor’s claiming of the throne as King Henry VII in 1485, but an event nearly fifty years earlier, the death and funeral of Catherine de Valois. The widow of King Henry V, Catherine married secondly the Welsh squire Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, known to posterity as Owen Tudor. Their elder son Edmund later married Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of John of Gaunt, one of King Edward III’s several sons, and it was the only child of this union, born when his mother was a mere girl thirteen years of age, who would become the victor on Bosworth Field. Full review...
101 Places in Italy : A Private Grand Tour by Francis Russell
Initially I struggled to describe this book. It's not a guide book: maps are intended only to give you a rough idea of where the towns, cities and villages are - even major rivers are not shown. There are no opening times of museums or other details which the visitor might need and whilst it's a tremendous help to the tourist there's a sense throughout the book of their being people who are best avoided if at all possible. November and February seem to be the best months for your visit in many cases. The 101 places you'll visit in the book are given no wider importance than the works of art within them. Finally I accepted that the subtitle of the book - A Private Grand Tour was the most appropriate. Full review...
Steaming to Victory: How Britain's Railways Won the War by Michael Williams
Soon after the end of the First World War, the British railways entered what is generally regarded as their golden age, with the heyday of the ‘Big Four’ companies, the LNER (London and North Eastern), LMS (London, Midlands and Scottish), GWR (Great Western) and Southern Railways. By 1939 they were beginning to lose their virtual monopoly of land-based transport to lorries, buses and coaches. Nevertheless, as war became increasingly inevitable, they played a vital part in the preparation to keep the country moving, keeping industry and the war effort supplied, helping in the evacuation of Dunkirk, or as their press office put it in a pamphlet of 1943, 'tackling the biggest job in transport history'. Full review...
The Boys In The Boat: An Epic Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin by Daniel James Brown
You see, Jesse Owens had it easy – all he had to do was run fast. Alright, he did have to face unknown hardship, heinous prejudice at home and abroad, and make sure he was fast enough to outdo the rest of his compatriots then the world's best to win gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but others who wished to do the same had to do more. People such as those rowers in the coxed eights squad – people such as young Joe Rantz. He certainly had to face hardship, the prejudice borne by those in the moneyed east coast yacht clubs against an upstart from the NW USA, and when he got to compete he had to use so many more muscles, and operate at varying tempi, with the temperament of the weather and water against him, all in perfect synchronicity with seven other beefcakes. Despite rowing being the second greatest ticket at those Games, Joe's story is a lot less well known, and probably a lot more entertaining. Full review...
The Last Days of Detroit: Motor Cars, Motown and the Collapse of an Industrial Giant by Mark Binelli
Moving back to his native Detroit, Mark Binelli tries to see where it all went wrong for a city which was once America's capitalist dream town but has shrunk more significantly than anywhere else in the country over recent years. How did this happen, and what effect has it had on the residents there? Is the decline irreversible, or can those who want to bring about a changed and improved Detroit succeed? Full review...
Penny Loaves and Butter Cheap: Britain in 1846 by Stephen Bates
Until I picked up this book, I would never have really thought of 1846 as a pivotal year in British history. Stephen Bates has proved convincingly in these pages that if it was not exactly a watershed one, it nevertheless marked an era of change. Full review...
Books that Changed the World: The 50 Most Influential Books in Human History by Andrew Taylor
Oh the pleasure when, as a book reviewer, one can simply point to the title and say – 'yup, that'. Or, I suppose, as in the non-existent follow-up, Adverts That Changed the World, simply repeat the mantra 'it does exactly what it says on the tin'. This paperback edition of the six year old original, fresh with several typos they had time to iron out alongside putting in Seamus Heaney's departure, makes life even easier, given that subtitle. I'm sure the more bibliophilic are already sold, and there is little influence I can bear on things. I will, however, soldier on. Full review...
Letters to the Midwife: Correspondence with the author of Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth
Jennifer Worth, author of the bestselling Call the Midwife, sadly passed away in May 2011 following a short illness. Her books have gained a great deal of popularity in recent years with their mixture of warmth, sadness and humour based on her experiences working as a midwife in the East End of London. Letters to the Midwife features some of the treasured letters received by Worth from former work colleagues and fans of her books. The resulting book is a rich testament to a life lived fully and to a very special lady whose memories have managed to inspire and touch so many. Full review...
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent by Robert A Caro
It's only a matter of days since I finished listening to The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, the first part of Robert A Caro's definitive work on the President and despite having just spent over forty hours on the book I wanted to learn more. I was torn though - the second book in a series is not often as good as the first and it struck me that these might not be the most exciting years in Johnson's life. Was this book going to be the link which took us on to the more exciting times? Not a bit of it. Full review...
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert A Caro
Lyndon Baines Johnson was the 36th President of the United States, preceded by John F Kennedy and succeeded by Richard Nixon, with both being remembered most for the way they left office. His five-year term in office was overshadowed at the start by the Kennedy assassination and increasingly blighted by the debacle which was Vietnam, but there was something about Johnson which always intrigued me: how does a poor boy from Texas hill country without an exceptional (or even 'good') education become president of the United States? 'The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power' tells you all that you need to know. Full review...
London Bridge in America: The Tall Story of a Transatlantic Crossing by Travis Elborough
The concept of people from overseas countries buying and owning old and long-established British industries and works of art is not new. Yet one of the most unusual sales of this kind occurred in March 1968. It was a time of British economic crisis (where and when have we heard that before) and the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign, and a time when the concept of heritage was unfashionable and the authorities seemed to attach more value to modernity than to relics of the Regency and the Victorian age. Full review...
Born in Siberia by Tamara Astafieva, Michael Darlow and Debbie Slater
I tend to shy away from reviewing book titles, but this time it seems appropriate – here it's a title that doesn't tell you the half of the story. As much as Tamara Astafieva was born in Siberia, and returned there several times, for many different reasons and with many very different outcomes, this is much more of a picture of the Soviet Union as we in Britain think of it – Moscow, a bit of Saint Petersburg, and little else. That's not a fault – and again it's not half of the story. The story here is so complex, so rich with detail and incident, and itself came about in such an unusual way, that any summary of the book has its work cut out in defining its many qualities. Full review...
Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: A World without World War I by Richard Ned Lebow
On the first page of this book, we are given a summary of events from August 2014. Queen Elizabeth is hosting a reception for Prince Harry and his bride, a niece of the German Kaiser at Balmoral, while the governor-general of India is involved in preparations for the next Commonwealth Games. This brief glimpse of a fantasy world is followed by a swift resumé of the twentieth century, as everything actually happened, and of changes in the world order wrought by both world wars. Chapter two tells of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie at Sarajevo in June 1914, the final catalyst which precipitated the First World War. Full review...
Hundred Days by Nick Lloyd
Nick Lloyd is a historian. Well, actually he's a lecturer in Defence Studies at Kings College London - based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in Shrivenham, Wiltshire. Full review...
Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz by Thomas Harding
This dual biography concerns, as the title makes clear, two men. One was from an inherently German, rich Jewish family – they had a powerboat so he could waterski on the lake at their country cottage – who fled the rise of the Nazis early in the 1930s, and got away moderately lightly, only losing properties and a large and successful medical career. The other was from an inherently German family, who signed up for First World War service before his age, but only really wanted to be a farmer and family man, yet who ended up running probably history's worst slaughterhouse. Both had a connection and a shared destiny that was largely unknown before this book was researched, there's a chance that both of them had the blood of one man and only one man directly on their hands from WWII service, and both of them – again, as the title makes clear – are given the dignity of the familiar, first name throughout this incredible book. Full review...
Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs by Bob Brier
There have been so many books written on the subject of Egyptology, it would be hard to imagine that anything new could be said on the matter. However, TV presenter and researcher Bob Brier, a self-confessed Egyptophile, has managed to approach the topic from a unique perspective by allowing us a glimpse of his fascinating collection of all things Egyptian. The collection is an eclectic mix of objects, including jewellery, private letters from Howard Carter, tobacco packaging, books, posters and tea-sets. In Brier’s collection, his ornate Josiah Wedgwood Egyptian set sits proudly on the shelf next to Barbie of the Nile and a cheap King Tut cologne bottle. As he puts it: 'we all know that something can be so bad that it’s good. The true collector has no shame.' Full review...