Browse all reviews
Milk / eds. Honor Beddard, Marianne Templeton
Review Date: 30 September 2023
The very first displays in Milk, a major Wellcome Collection exhibition, convey the strangeness of a food we all know well. Entitled 'the story of milk', the opening room sparks reflection on the oddness of the narratives and images imprinted on a deceptively simple part of our diet.
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.
What’s the point of history? / Daniel Woolf
Review Date: 06 November 2020
The sub-branch of history that is known by the ambiguous (and frightening to undergraduates, cats, and many mainstream academics) name “historiography” seems to be undergoing a Renaissance at the moment.
War: An Enquiry / A. C. Grayling
Review Date: 07 December 2017
Media, with alarming regularity, reports nuclear threats from North Korea and President Trump’s rhetorical belligerency; Russian and Chinese irredentism conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, across the Sahel region of Africa and Yemen; not to forget the asymmentry of terrorism.
The Witch: A History of Fear From Ancient Times to the Present / Ronald Hutton
Review Date: 26 October 2017
This is an extremely ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging and inspiring book. It is informed by Hutton’s earlier books (1), but it is also a culmination of his work over the last 15 years.
The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity / Johana Hannink
Review Date: 03 August 2017
At the height of the Greek financial crisis, reports from colleagues based in Athens painted a sorry picture of respectable citizens who had fallen upon hard times desperately rummaging in dustbins to supplement their dwindling larders. The statistics told an even grimmer story – between 2010 and 2011, suicide rates in Greece rose by 40 per cent.
Civil Wars: A History in Ideas / David Armitage
Review Date: 27 July 2017
Civil war plagues our times. As David Armitage notes in his brilliant work, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, the idea of the ‘Long Peace’ after the Second World War is in many ways misleading as intrastate conflict has become far more common than in previous centuries.
Twilight of History / Shlomo Sand
Review Date: 04 May 2017
Shlomo Sand is no stranger to controversy.
Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment / Brian Copenhaver
Review Date: 29 September 2016
Frances Yates’ seminal book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), which established a longstanding scholarly orthodoxy that Renaissance magic derived from interpretations of the Hermetic Corpus, has been challenged in its details by Bruno scholars and others.
Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Latin West, 300-1200 / eds. Kate Cooper, Conrad Leyser
Review Date: 11 August 2016
This collection of ten articles was inspired by an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Manchester in 2005 on ‘The Peace in the Feud: History and Anthropology, 1955–2005’.