|summary=It starts with a painting. The painting isn't the point: the subject is. In the Autumn of 1319 a Franciscan Friar stands before his accusers. Entitled ''L'Agitateur du Languedoc'' the artwork portrays the trial of Bernard Délicieux, the eponymous Friar of Carcassonne. Although O'Shea veers clear of telling us the outcome of the trial, one cannot help feeling that it wasn't an acquittal. Such things tended not to go down in history quite so resoundingly. Not in those days.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668319X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Matthew Kelly
|title=Finding Poland
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=Looking at any historical map of Poland anyone may see how its borders have changed over the centuries. Where will you find the Polish home? One answer must be that it is founded deep in the hearts of the Polish people who fought for the liberty and the integrity of the Polish homeland. Now consider the promontory of land around Vilnius, or Wilno as it was then known, which was contained inside Poland in 1921. It was an area in which the small market town of Hruzdowa, comprising some 52 buildings and just large enough to warrant a town hall, was situated. These wild borderlands – known as the Kresy - were fought over for centuries by Austrians, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Lithuanians. It was here that Matthew Kelly's great-grandfather, who had imbibed the values and élan of the dashing officer class, Rafal Ryzewscy, came to teach with his clever young wife, Hanna. They were deeply committed to progress through education and to peaceably raising their two little daughters. However, the dreadful and calamitous year of 1939, was approaching when Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland in the most cynical pact.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099515997</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Mick Conefrey
|title=How to Climb Mont Blanc in a Skirt: A Handbook for the Lady Adventurer
|rating=4
|genre=Travel
|summary=Scott, Amundsen, Bleriot, Stanley and Livingstone, John Glenn, et all - any child should be drummed out of school if they can't name half a dozen explorers, travel pioneers and adventurers. But give them a gold star if they can name a single female entrant to history's list. Hence this book, for while some mountains have been topped by a lady first of all, and some landmark achievements by the guys have been quickly followed by the gals, there is just too much ground to be made up in recognising what the fairer sex have done in the world of, well, going round our world.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1851688412</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Bennett
|title=A Magnificent Disaster: The Failure of the Market Garden, the Arnhem Operation, September 1944
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=Operation Market Garden, September 1944 is encapsulated for most people in the Hollywood movie "A Bridge Too Far" which, like most movies, gets some of it right and some of it wrong.
Such anyway is Bennett's assessment. So what is the true story of what one Major Norton called a magnificent disaster, perhaps consciously echoing that judgement on the charge of the Light Brigade in a far earlier conflict "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre"?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>193514989X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Lynn Peril
|title=Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=The subtitle of this book suggests a survival guide to secretarial work. However, this is definitely not a handbook, but an examination of the portrayal of the job and those who do it in the media and in handbooks over the last 100 years. It is an American book and all the references are to handbooks, media, popular fiction and advertising from the US, but as a secretary in Britain, I still found it relevant, interesting and very entertaining.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0393338541</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Niall McCrae
|title=The Moon and Madness
|rating=4
|genre=Popular Science
|summary=A book entitled ''The Moon and Madness'' has the potential to be a pile of New Age hokum. This learned and academic treatise by Niall McCrae is very far from hokum, and there is not a whiff of New Age hanging over it. We probably all have an old folklore image in our minds of lunatics in the asylum howling at the full moon. Of course, the very word 'lunatic' has its origins in the moon. McCrae tries to separate myth and fact in this fascinating book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845402146</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Nigel Jones
|title=Tower
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=If you had to name one particular artefact which personifies the history of England, it would be hard to choose anything more appropriate than the building which has at various times been a castle, a palace, a prison, a torture chamber, and execution site, an armoury, and is now the most visited tourist attraction in the nation.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091936659</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Annelise Freisenbruch
|title=The First Ladies of Rome: The Women Behind the Caesars
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=Perhaps the most shocking thing to be gleaned from this fascinating history of the women who surrounded the Caesars is how easily their reputations were created, moulded and destroyed. Any woman who put a foot out of line in a culture where men held almost all the power could be accused of a litany of crimes which bore curious similarities with those of many another woman in similar circumstances. Incest and adultery were charges regularly levied against them, and the very fact that the details were identical in almost every case should give rise to suspicion about their accuracy. And yet history has accepted and spread these scandals as fact.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099523930</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Daniel Allen Butler
|title=The Other Side of the Night: The Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night the Titanic Was Lost
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=It's now almost a century since the loss of the ''Titanic'' and although much has been written about almost every aspect of that dreadful night one point has remained a mystery. When the wireless operator on the 'unsinkable' Titanic radioed that the ship had hit an iceberg, had too few lifeboats for all passengers and was sinking fast there were two ships in the vicinity. Captain Arthur Rostron on the ''Carpathia'' responded to the distress signal and hastened to the Titanic's aid. But Captain Stanley Lord of the ''Californian'' did not respond. The ship's radio officer had retired for the night and Lord failed to take decisive action later that night when told about distress flares from the Titanic. The controversy as to why the two captains should have acted so differently has raged across the intervening years.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1935149857</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=D R Thorpe
|title=Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=The great-grandson of a crofter, and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan was born in London in 1894. Despite the well-to-do aristocratic background, his years as a young adult were marked by bad experiences in the trenches which left him with lifelong war wounds, and his early service as a Conservative Member of Parliament by the plight of the unemployed in his first constituency of Stockton. He had much in common with another future Prime Minister, Winston Churchill; both had American mothers, and both were mavericks who were elected as Conservatives but refused to toe the party line too steadfastly.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1844135411</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Jenkins
|title=A Short History of England
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=Most of us see history rather like a cloud. We're aware of the great mass of it, seeing some parts more clearly than others, but perhaps struggling to bring it into a straight line. Some parts we will have studied at school, or read about out of interest but these parts will be balanced by other periods when we will be woefully ignorant of some of the most basic facts. I've studied the Tudors in some depth at various points in my life – but I would struggle to tell you much about the Stuarts. What was needed was a concise history of England in one volume and written for the adult reader who would simply like to be more informed, but not over-burdened.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846684617</amazonuk>
}}
