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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
4 Nov 2022

Writing in Macmillan’s Magazine a few years after the denouement of the Crimean War, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, declared that this conflict’s ‘drama ...

Review Date: 
30 Jun 2022

According to a survey carried out by the National Federation of Fish Fryers in the 1960s, the first fish and chip shop was opened by Joseph Malins in 1860 on Old Ford Road in the East End of London (p. 234). The combination of the fried fish that had been sold and eaten in the Jewish East End since the early nineteenth century with chips created what became a quintessentially British meal.

Review Date: 
25 Mar 2022

Early modern Scotland was awash with cheap print. Adam Fox, in the first dedicated study of the phenomenon in Scotland, gives readers some startling figures. Andro Hart, one of Edinburgh’s leading booksellers, died in 1622. In his possession, according to his inventory, were 42,300 unbound copies of English books printed on his own presses.

Review Date: 
21 May 2021

Englishmen have always travelled. According to French Abbé Le Blanc, they travelled more than other people of Europe because `they look upon their isle as a sort of prison; and the first use they make of their liberty is to get out of it'.(1) For young elite males who travelled to France and Italy for up to five years, the Grand Tour was, most historians agree, ‘intended to provide the final ed

Review Date: 
26 Mar 2021

‘The English Reformation has not ended’, concludes Memory and the English Reformation’s introduction. ‘Continually refought in memory and the imagination, the battles it began will never be over’ (p.45). Through memory studies, this volume nudges the very worn question of England’s long Reformation(s) in a revitalising direction.

Review Date: 
26 Feb 2021

Within the past decade, much debate has ensued surrounding the question of whether or not food studies and culinary history constitute valid academic disciples.

Review Date: 
15 Jan 2020

If it is hard to write a book review, then it is much harder to make a book. Anthony Grafton's latest monograph, Inky Fingers, puts the difficulties of labour at the centre of this engaging study of book production in early modern Europe and North America (the latter included despite the expected limitations of the subtitle).

Review Date: 
11 Dec 2020

‘Artificial intelligence (AI)’ is a loaded term, rife with connotative contradiction that inspires debate, disagreement, and disillusion. But what is AI, really? How have our expectations of computational capability, and even a robot Armageddon, come to be? Why does it matter how we talk about increasingly sophisticated technology, not just in expository prose, but also in fiction?

Review Date: 
4 Dec 2020

Luke Blaxill’s book deserves to be seminal. Its unassuming title conceals a bracing methodological challenge: an argument for the application of specific digital techniques to the study of electoral politics.

Review Date: 
20 Nov 2020

Danger, disaster and the loss of life are emblematic features of Britain’s cultural memory of coal mining. Netflix’s hit series, The Crown, prominently reinforced these motifs through its recent portrayal of the 1966 Aberfan disaster in South Wales.

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