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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
6 Mar 2014

David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is an impressive scholarly accomplishment that matches a dauntingly large subject matter with a vast vault of personal knowledge. At 474 pages and 13 chapters covering more than 3000 years, it is thorough without being exhaustive.

Review Date: 
3 Oct 2013

When you walk in to the Propaganda: Power and Persuasion Exhibition at the British Library you are told that ‘propaganda is used to fight wars and combat disease, build unity and create division’. You then walk through a guard of honour of black mannequins that offer different definitions of the word ‘propaganda’.

Review Date: 
12 Sep 2013

The monumental importance of the exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum lies not least in the staggering number of people it has reached.

Review Date: 
29 Aug 2013

Silence speaks as a visual conceit through the serene icon of Mary Magdalene, chosen to illustrate the dust jacket enfolding Silence: A Christian History, foreshadowing themes in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial study.

Review Date: 
11 Jul 2013

This book is highly recommended, particularly for food historians who want to step away from their musty old texts to imagine what it would be like to work in the dirt for a while. Archaeology is a closely related sister discipline, though not well represented among the myriad fields that make up food studies today.

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.

Review Date: 
6 Sep 2012

One can hardly imagine that several decades ago the concept of spolia did not yet indicate a field of widespread research in the history of architecture, art and archaeology. The title of this volume with 12 essays and a fascinating introduction, points to this change in research focus, since the value of reuse of objects and materials has not always been recognized.

Review Date: 
26 Jul 2012

As L. P. Hartley famously remarked in The Go-Between (1953), ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. This was more prescient than he knew, for most of the English-speaking world now seems to view the past not merely as foreign but as totally alien –  diverting at times, perhaps, but utterly irrelevant to them and their lives.

Review Date: 
26 Jul 2012

In an age of crisis a late Roman bureaucrat offered a plan for reforming military recruitment and training to an unnamed emperor, who requested the project’s continuation.

Review Date: 
20 Jul 2012

Playing on the title of Robert Hughes's popular history of modernist art, The Shock of the New (1980), Larry Norman recreates that moment in 17th- and 18th-century France when the classical literary texts that Renaissance humanists had treated as timeless vehicles of cultural value, and so put at the core of European education, came to many to seem shockingly ‘primitive,’ even ‘barbari

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