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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
9 Jan 2020

There is no more exemplary figurehead for the history of legal culture than the late Christopher W. Brooks. As the editors of this volume observe, by the time of his death in 2014 Brooks ‘had established a firm reputation as the most important and influential historian of law and society in early modern England’ (p. 1).

Review Date: 
19 Dec 2019

The planning of cities from the 1940s to the 1960s is one of the major strands of British (and indeed, international) post-war social history.

Review Date: 
19 Dec 2019

This short book deals with urban panegyric in the 12th and 13th centuries. It takes ‘urban panegyric’ to mean the ‘praise of cities’, whether expressed in (quite often poetical) texts written with the express purpose of praising cities, or as parts of texts whose titles do not necessarily suggest that praise of a city might be found there.

Review Date: 
12 Dec 2019

The consular official has often been a derided figure in the historiography of foreign services, often seen as uneducated, involved in commerce, and corrupt, perhaps personified in the figure of ‘Charles Fortnum’ in Graham Greene’s spy novel The Honorary Consul.(1) Such criticisms were often levelled at consuls.

Review Date: 
21 Nov 2019

The history of religious toleration during the early modern period has been revitalised over the past decade. Scholars such as Alexandra Walsham and Benjamin Kaplan have shown that early modern society did not view toleration as the social virtue that was later espoused by enlightenment thinkers.

Review Date: 
7 Nov 2019

Gary De Krey is a leading historian of mid-to-late 17th-century London. His two monographs on the City: London and the Restoration and A Fractured Society capture the complexity, dynamics and interiority of London politics in ways that have often stumped the best of historians.

Review Date: 
7 Nov 2019

Pauline Gregg’s Freeborn John was previously the most recent full biographical work on John Lilburne. Published in 1961, Gregg’s work was extremely close to H. N. Brailsford’s seminal The Levellers and the English Revolution; the two works standing for decades as the cornerstones to Leveller historiography.

Review Date: 
31 Oct 2019

Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell have written an ambitious, detailed and wide-ranging book about government and Indigenous Australians in colonial Australia.

Review Date: 
24 Oct 2019

These days, expenditure on health amounts on average to some 9 per cent of gross domestic product in the prosperous nations of the West. Whether through direct taxation, social security, social health insurance or private means, it’s a substantial amount.

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