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Scandals are titillating phenomena, intriguing and enjoyable for almost everyone except their victims. They often carry two highly attractive features: first sex, and second the opportunity of watching high and mighty people being revealed to have feet of clay and thus brought low.

For medievalists, the long-awaited appearance of Gerald Harriss’s volume in the New Oxford History of England constitutes a major publishing event. In this superb study a leading academic historian, K. B. McFarlane’s successor at Magdalen, offers an authoritative summing-up of a period which saw medieval England transformed.

Histories of the Cold War have often, for obvious reasons, concentrated on the grand struggle between 'East and West', 'Communism and Capitalism', the 'USSR and the United States'.

Brian Weiser takes as his subject the court and politics of Charles II’s reign, examining them through the glass of access. Following the examples of earlier historians of European courts, he is interested in how a monarch’s availability to his subjects reflects his policies and attitudes.

In his review of David Howell’s MacDonald’s Party Matthew Worley praised Howell for his exposition of Labour’s ‘high’ politics and excused him for not including ‘an analysis of local Labour identities’; doing so would, Worley noted, ‘have added years to the book’s construction and probably h

On 28 January 1648 Thomas Edwards (c.1599–1648), Presbyterian controversialist and 'true hammer of the heretics', died in exile at Amsterdam.

Birthing the Nation represents history of medicine at its most inclusive. Born itself from the author's doctoral work on the history of midwifery, this book is an insightful and hard-hitting examination of how men-midwives and questions of reproduction more generally intersected with national identities and scientific knowledge.

The literature on the role of the French as ‘other’ in the formation of a British national identity in the eighteenth century is probably not as rich as many readers might think.(1) Indeed, the literature on French Anglophobia seems a little more sustained.(2) Semmel’s work, which looks at the impact of Napoleon on British politi

In July 2004 Tony Blair attacked the 'liberal consensus' of the 1960s, claiming that it had helped to undermine respect for law and order in Britain. It was hardly the first time that Blair had borrowed an argument from the right wing of the Conservative Party, but this speech set new standards of audacity.

If you are shallow enough to buy this book because of its cover you will be heartily disappointed. The image of Arthur Griffith brandishing a Union Jack, with destruction in his wake and the bodies of women and children trampled under his feet, is possibly the most inappropriate that the author or his publisher could have chosen.