Browse all reviews
The Crimean War and its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain / Lara Kriegel
Review Date: 04 November 2022
Writing in Macmillan’s Magazine a few years after the denouement of the Crimean War, Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, declared that this conflict’s ‘drama ... will never fail deeply to move the heart of England, at least until the grave has closed over our generation.
Migrant City: A New History of London / Panikos Panayi
Review Date: 30 June 2022
According to a survey carried out by the National Federation of Fish Fryers in the 1960s, the first fish and chip shop was opened by Joseph Malins in 1860 on Old Ford Road in the East End of London (p. 234).
The Press and the People: Cheap Print and Society in Scotland, 1500-1785 / Adam Fox
Review Date: 25 March 2022
Early modern Scotland was awash with cheap print. Adam Fox, in the first dedicated study of the phenomenon in Scotland, gives readers some startling figures. Andro Hart, one of Edinburgh’s leading booksellers, died in 1622. In his possession, according to his inventory, were 42,300 unbound copies of English books printed on his own presses.
Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour / Sarah Goldsmith
Review Date: 21 May 2021
Englishmen have always travelled. According to French Abbé Le Blanc, they travelled more than other people of Europe because `they look upon their isle as a sort of prison; and the first use they make of their liberty is to get out of it'.(1) For young elite males who travelled to France and Italy for up to five years, the Grand Tour was, most historians agree, ‘intended to provide the final education and polish’.
Memory and the English Reformation / eds. Alexandra Walsham, Bronwyn Wallace, Ceri Law, Brian Cummings
Review Date: 26 March 2021
‘The English Reformation has not ended’, concludes Memory and the English Reformation’s introduction. ‘Continually refought in memory and the imagination, the battles it began will never be over’ (p.45). Through memory studies, this volume nudges the very worn question of England’s long Reformation(s) in a revitalising direction. Noting that scholars have rarely focused on how the English Reformation ‘became crystalised in the historical imagination’ (p.
Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain / Troy Bickham
Review Date: 26 February 2021
Within the past decade, much debate has ensued surrounding the question of whether or not food studies and culinary history constitute valid academic disciples. Detractors of these fields contend that in an age of food network channels and a proliferation of YouTube videos extoling the virtues of every possible ingredient, recipe, and technique—with or without historical support, food studies lack academic rigor.
AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines / eds. Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, Sarah Dillon
Review Date: 11 December 2020
‘Artificial intelligence (AI)’ is a loaded term, rife with connotative contradiction that inspires debate, disagreement, and disillusion.
The War of Words: The Language of British Elections, 1880-1914 / Luke Blaxill
Review Date: 04 December 2020
Luke Blaxill’s book deserves to be seminal. Its unassuming title conceals a bracing methodological challenge: an argument for the application of specific digital techniques to the study of electoral politics. It deploys ‘corpus linguistics’—the computerised compilation and interrogation of massive databases of millions of words—to intervene in a series of debates about the language of the platform in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Disability in industrial Britain: A cultural and literary history of impairment in the coal industry, 1880-1948 / Alexandra Jones, Mike Mantin, Steven Thompson, Kirsti Bohata
Review Date: 20 November 2020
Danger, disaster and the loss of life are emblematic features of Britain’s cultural memory of coal mining. Netflix’s hit series, The Crown, prominently reinforced these motifs through its recent portrayal of the 1966 Aberfan disaster in South Wales.
A Little Gay History of Wales / Daryl Leeworthy
Review Date: 23 October 2020
In January 1988, hundreds of people gathered in Cardiff for a rally organised by ‘Wales Against Clause 28’. Held aloft ‘were signs identifying the places the mainly lesbian and gay marchers had lived and where they were from to disprove the popular notion that “there were no gays in Wales”.’ (p.