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A. J. Sylvester, David Lloyd George's private secretary from 1921 until 1945, and who therefore should have had a better opportunity than most to reach a judgement, was, like most historians who have tried to come to terms with the Welshman's energetic and enigmatic character, baffled by it.
Research on the history of venereal diseases (VD), syphilis, gonorrhoea, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs in more recent parlance), has flourished in recent years. Both the editors of the current volume have recently published books on the topic, Davidson on VD policy and practice in Scotland, Hall a more general synthetic work.
Thanks to the survival of four high quality narratives from the tenth and eleventh centuries, Widukind of Corvey's Rerum gestarum Saxonicarum, Thietmar of Merseberg's Chronicon, Lampert of Hersfeld's Annales, and Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, we know today much more about the Saxon gens, the newcomer to the Frankish realm, than o
This is the third book on Russian women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century collectively authored by Jane McDermid and Anna Hillyar of Southampton University.
Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier was a Swiss Protestant of French descent who served in the army of the British East India Company. The major part of his service was in northern India, beyond the area under formal British control.
History on this scale is a daunting task, not just for the breadth of scholarship it requires but also because it lays before the author the powerful temptations of platitude and over-generalization. Geoffrey Hosking, as he has amply shown elsewhere, is a historian who can draw a big picture without losing his curiosity, his feel for detail, or his capacity for concise but penetrating summary.
I know from my own research into the pre-First World War activities of the British military attachés in Berlin just how difficult it is to find archival material that illuminates the role of these elusive soldier-diplomats.(1) Not only did few of these individuals keep extensive collections of private papers, but the War Office, taking the view that intelligence materi
In a famous essay on the tenacity of the Burckhardtian conception of the Renaissance, Johan Huizinga wrote that '[A]t the sound of the word ‘Renaissance’ the dreamer of past beauty sees purple and gold.' After reading Carole Collier Frick’s engrossing, multi-layered book, Huizinga’s romantic dreamers will have to become far more nuanced in their visual imaginings of the past.
Luxury in the Eighteenth Century is a welcome collection of essays on a very important topic.
The study of masculinity as a specific topic (rather than an implicit element) is not utterly new: work in sociology in the 1980s, cultural studies in the 1990s, and concerns of feminist criticism from much earlier have laid the foundations for studying how men set about being men. Historians have also engaged with the topic, most notably in work on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.