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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
3 Jul 2014

Timing counts for so much in publishing and that is never clearer than when a major anniversary approaches. With the centenary of the First World War not yet actually upon us, there has already been a rush of publications. Meanwhile, just as many of the grandest television and radio programmes promised by the BBC have already been aired. Do we know anything we did not know a year or two ago?

Review Date: 
15 May 2014

Early in his single-term presidency, Jimmy Carter dismissed as ‘just semantics’ a flap that arose after he extemporaneously echoed Israel’s position that any peace settlement with its neighbours required ‘defensible borders’.(1) In fact, as his aides quickly clarified, Carter had actually meant a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders with minor adjustments for s

Review Date: 
1 May 2014

Professor Faroqhi has long been considered a world expert on Ottoman history and her new book, Travel and Artisans in the Ottoman Empire: Employment and Mobility in the Early Modern World, serves to confirm this position.

Review Date: 
24 Apr 2014

The word ‘hostage’ might immediately bring to mind hostile situations: the entrapment of a wealthy businessman’s daughter in exchange for money, a terrorist incident (1) or a manifestation of domestic abuse.(2) However, the meaning of hostageship has undergone many transformations over time, some of which are brought under the microscope Profe

Review Date: 
26 Sep 2013

In a time of ‘pressure to publish’, ‘publish or perish’, and ‘publish then perish’, it’s a great pleasure to read a work that has taken a decade to metamorphose from a small folder of notes on the Southeast Asian Hajj to this enormously rich and varied volume.

Review Date: 
25 Jul 2013

The Ottoman Empire, over the course of its existence, evolved a cultural synthesis of strands coming from its Arab, Persian and Byzantine antecedents, as well as the folk culture of its constituent populations. Culinary traditions were part of this legacy, and the taste for sweets an ever popular and refined element, constituting a repertoire extending into modern Turkey and the Middle East.

Review Date: 
23 May 2013

It is interesting that well into the 21st century two books written by Turkish authors belonging to the historiography of the Armenian Genocide should be so vastly different in argument.

Review Date: 
9 May 2013

In comparison with the many recently published one-volume histories of the crusade movement, Malcolm Barber has undertaken a relatively modest task: a history of the crusader states from the time of the First Crusade (1096–1109) to the end of the Third (1187–92).

Review Date: 
7 Mar 2013

Once upon a time, as every schoolboy knew, the history of the British Empire was the history of great men.

Review Date: 
28 Feb 2013

This rich volume, Byzantium and the Other: Relations and Exchanges, is one of three collections of essays designed to bear testament to the legacy of the late Byzantine scholar Angeliki Laiou. The other two volumes are entitled: Women, Family and Society in Byzantium and Economic Thought and Economic Life in Byzantium.

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