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W. B. Yeats’s famous poem, ‘Easter 1916’, is an ambivalent celebration of the new pantheon of heroes created when, through the means of a failed nationalist rebellion in Dublin, ‘a terrible beauty is born’.
Martin Hewitt’s study is a meticulously researched account of the mid-Victorian phase of the campaigns against press taxes.
Dr Chris A Williams undertakes an ambitious project in attempting to analytically discuss aspects of the development of a public institution over a 200-year period, within a publication limited to 242 pages.
It has become a commonplace to assert that biographies are unfashionable these days. I’m not sure that’s entirely true, even for English history (female subjects certainly buck the trend), but there is no doubt that they are still the staple of Scottish history, particularly when it comes to the middle ages.
Wellington: The Path to Victory, 1769-1814 is the first of two volumes based on exhaustive research on Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, by Rory Muir – to be precise, it is based on 30 years work on the subject.
It was once a truism of modern British historiography that the history of the Conservative party was grievously understudied. This has not been the case for some time: things began to change with the pioneering work of the late John Ramsden in the 1970s, and then from the 1980s as historians such as Philip Williamson began to offer significant reassessments of aspects of the party’s past.
Kevin Sharpe’s posthumously published Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England is a collection of his interdisciplinary articles and chapters that highlight his work on redefining political history in early modern British studies from 2001. The volume is organised in two sections entitled respectively ‘reading authority’ and ‘representing rule’.
John Edwards’s new biography of Cardinal Reginald Pole, part of Ashgate’s Archbishops of Canterbury Series, is a magnificent example of first-rate historical scholarship. Reginald Pole is no easy subject.
Despite the substantial historiography of Edward I’s reign, this is the first real attempt to examine in depth the relations between this king and his earls at a crucial time in the development of both monarchy and nobility. Edward I is a king now remembered mainly for his ‘masterfulness’ when dealing with the English nobility, a term with which Spencer takes some issue.
Matthew Hendley’s Organized Patriotism examines the ways in which three ‘patriotic and imperialist leagues’ coped with the impact of the First World War. Focusing on the ‘politically and socially acceptable’ National Service League, League of the Empire and Victoria League (p.