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Once in a long while a work of such scope and magnitude is published that our assumptions about history - its events, its causes, its effects - are fundamentally challenged.
This is not such a work.
In the middle of the period covered by this book, one of the most resonant accounts of urban life ever written was composed by the poet Dante. For all its startling vividness, however, Dante's evocation of the city in the Divine Comedy is not easy to interpret.
The appearance of a new collection of essays from Professor Nelson merely needs to be signalled for its importance to be apparent.
Over the past three decades the North of Ireland has been plagued by injustice.
Hanna Diamond's study of women in occupied France and the period immediately following the Liberation represents a considerable achievement and an invaluable contribution to scholarship on how French women responded to the hardships, upheavals and conflicts of wartime occupation.
For some time we have been waiting for an accessibly written, archivally rich, and theoretically informed social history of East Germany. Corey Ross's first book scores very highly on all counts, presenting an invigorating bottom-up history of the GDR in its two formative decades.
By official decree, Brazil celebrates its 500th anniversary in 2000: the modern history of the country dating from April, 1500, when a fleet commanded by Pedro Alvares Cabral anchored at Porto Seguro on the north-east coast of Bahia.
Dreaming about the royal family is a recognized historical phenomenon. In 1972 Brian Masters devoted an entire book to exploring it . Fifty per cent of the dreams he collected involved having tea with one or other member of the family. A minor and darker aspect of the phenomenon is the premonition in dreams of royal deaths.
Peter Russell's Henry 'the Navigator' is one of those rare books which has had classic, or rather legendary, status even before it was published.
This book is impressively detailed, showing women's experience of demobilisation and the aftermath of armed conflict - an often neglected area of military study relating to women - as well as their feelings about morality, their male counterparts, uniforms, duties and a slew of other subjects.