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If the debut of the Illustrated London News (ILN) in May 1842 signalled ‘a revolution in journalism and news reporting’, as the introduction to this remarkable on-line collection contends, there can be little doubt that an equally revolutionary transformation has occurred over the c

This is an accessible and engaging book about the ranks, obligations, and image of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, written by one of the leading historians of the period. Ann Williams is the author of The English and the Norman Conquest, Kingship and Government in Pre-Conquest England c.

Tudor scholars and enthusiasts alike marked a significant anniversary on 21 April 2009: the quincentenary of Henry VIII’s accession to the English throne.(1) While this historical milestone highlights Henry VIII’s seemingly unassailable position in England’s national consciousness and its romantic imagination, it also marked the conclusion of an equally important – but

Two years after the death of Sir Robert Peel in 1850, Walter Bagehot asked his readers ‘Was there ever such a dull man? Can any one, without horror, foresee the reading of his memoirs?’(1) This was by no means a rhetorical question, for Peel had prepared three volumes of reminiscences to be published after his death.

The editors of this volume situate their collection of essays in a landscape in which the interregnum as a whole is neglected territory for historians, and the royalist experience of it an unexplored substratum. Even allowing for the tendency towards polemical overstatement that marks their own contributions to this volume, their assessment is in general terms accurate.

This book sheds much light on the ascendancy of liberal values in the 19th century and their role in the transformation of the fiscal military state of the previous century. While using a wealth of secondary literature, including many essays and review articles in literary weeklies and monthlies, William Lubenow charts new and important territory.

Two decades ago, it was possible for historians of fascism in Britain to remark that the literature of their subject was unnecessarily limited. Up to that point, writers had accepted two self-imposed restrictions which were no longer capable of justification.

Esther Breitenbach and Pat Thane’s edited collection, Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century is a timely and very useful addition to the historiography.

The study of the unhappy reign of Stephen (1135–54) is as old as professional history in England, and indeed the problem of Stephen was one of the early concerns of William Stubbs, the midwife of the Oxford History Schools and founder of the constitutionalist approach to English history.

In bringing his history of Britain almost to the present, Paul Addison is the latest to tackle the problem which Macaulay identified in 1841: English history, he wrote, ‘from 1688 to the French Revolution, is even to educated people almost a terra incognita’. For Walter Bagehot in 1876: ‘the events for which one generation cares most are often those of which the next knows least.