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Review Date: 17 July 2020

Jonathan Scott, Professor of History at the University of Auckland, in his recent book, How the Old World Ended (2019), has provided an intellectual bridge between the early modern period and the modern world, which was born out of the Industrial Revolution.

Review Date: 19 June 2020

In Automobility and the City in Twentieth-Century Britain and Japan, Simon Gunn and Susan Townsend have written the equivalent of three books.

Review Date: 15 May 2020

This volume arrives with high praise. The book ‘[d]eserves to become another classic’, opines Peter Burke at the top of the front cover. It ‘[c]ompletely overhauls our view’, observes Ronald Hutton somewhat further down. The work itself is not shy of ambition either. Both the title—The Decline of Magic—and the subtitle—Britain in the Enlightenment—promise sweeping panoramas.

Review Date: 15 January 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: 28 November 2019

In the summer of 1948 Alexander Fleming, known around the world as the discoverer of penicillin, visited Spain. Fleming had published his famous paper on the antimicrobial effect of the Penicillium notatum mould in 1929. During the 1930s researchers worked on methods to extract therapeutic agents from the mould, and by 1942 drug companies in the US had developed efficient methods of mass production.

Review Date: 28 November 2019

Francis Bacon’s unfinished utopian novel The New Atlantis is often invoked in scholarship about early modern scientific projects. With its ‘Merchants of Light’ who gather information and bring it back to the House of Solomon, The New Atlantis seems to capture perfectly the aspirations of a group of European scholars who saw themselves as reassessing the bases of knowledge by revaluing personal experience.

Review Date: 24 October 2019

I.‘There is abundant anecdotal evidence of the “conventional wisdom” that one of the defining features of contemporary social existence is the pervasiveness of anxiety.’ Thus kicks off a co-authored article of the Council for European Studies from 2018.(1) It argues that anxiety is what causes the modern pulse to race, and that, by consequence, to feel society’s pulse is effectively done by studying ‘anxiety culture’.

Review Date: 02 May 2019

Historically, wars have always witnessed reports of ghostly sightings and visions. However, the First World War is of particular interest as such phenomena occurred in a more modern, secular environment, at a time when science and secularisation had emerged as predominant ways of thinking about the world. In addition, the number of lives being lost due to conflict was unprecedented.

Review Date: 06 September 2018

Last year’s prestigious AMC fictional drama The Terror traced the fate of John Franklin’s crew from the moment the famous expedition in search of the Northwest Passage grinded to a halt in the Arctic ice near King William Island, in 1846, to the disappearance of second-in-command Francis Crozier, years later.

Review Date: 21 June 2018

Joseph Lister is perhaps the most famous man in the history of British medicine. Born in April 1827, he was a surgeon and pioneer of antiseptic operative practice. President of the Royal Society between 1895 and 1900, he was raised to the peerage in 1897.