Search
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/brady.jpg?itok=nKWdLdmD)
Aidan Clarke is a formidable and influential scholar of early modern Ireland. His scholarship has always set a high standard: firmly grounded empirically, challenging of received 'truths' and, in its faithfulness to chronology, sensitive to how contemporaries may have perceived events.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/mcgurk.jpg?itok=ceZZQoLO)
Sir Henry Docwra, first baron Docwra of Culmore (in the Irish peerage), personified those who rose thanks to the opportunities offered by Ireland in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Docwra shows how minor gentlemen of obscure but solid backgrounds prospered thanks particularly to soldiering.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/lane.jpg?itok=6s5OfPmb)
This Fintan Lane and Donal Ó Drisceoil edited work is a welcome addition to the existing historiography. It concerns the Irish working class and politics over the course of a century. As the introduction points out, the attention of historians has not been directed towards Irish labour to the extent seen in other western European countries.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/fleming.jpg?itok=jMvrxPQl)
In a strange coincidence, two books have been published on 'Charlie', the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, in the last two years: Ian Kershaw's Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain's Road to War (2004) and Neil Fleming's, the subject of this review.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/fleming_0.jpg?itok=QKw_YltO)
The standard of pastoral care provided by the 18th-century Church of England received a notoriously bad press both from its contemporary Evangelical critics and from its Victorian successor.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/power_0.jpg?itok=YB9e0XMI)
This is a splendid book, weighty, richly documented and densely argued. The title might suggest a book of focused, perhaps rather limited scope.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/schiebinger.jpg?itok=A3U5X8Vt)
The editors of this very useful collection of essays boldly state that it is their thesis that 'early modern botany both facilitated and profited from colonisation and long distance trade and that the development of botany and Europe's commercial and territorial expansion are closely associated developments' (p. 3).
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/mcintosh.jpg?itok=tD66xsFG)
Working Women in English Society offers a fascinating insight into the numerous ways in which women engaged with the market economy in England between 1300 and 1620.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/tsang.jpg?itok=KhwoU540)
Historians of the Asian Cold War have often focused on the interactions between the United States and Communist China, treating the United Kingdom (UK) and the Republic of China (ROC) as secondary players eager to manipulate and restrain their respective friends and foes.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/beaven_0.jpg?itok=cdd26b10)
Since the 1960s, popular leisure has been studied by successive generations of British social historians. Questions of class, of culture and of identity have been central to the development of this literature. Celebrations of distinctively plebeian customs have contended with pessimistic analyses of mass culture as a form of social control.