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Review Date: 01 May 2024

From the 1920s-1940s, in America and Britain, many writers, artists, poets, musicians and other cultural workers were drawn to socially democratic artforms, influenced by Popular Front cultural aesthetics. The very broad group, which may have been ‘pro Communist’ politically and interested in diverse expressions of egalitarianism culturally, are frequently defined mainly in relationship to the 1930s, and to ideas about socially committed literature.

Review Date: 01 March 2024

The study of the early modern home has drawn mounting interest from academic historians over the past decade. From Sara Pennell’s The Birth of the English Kitchen (2016), to Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson’s beautifully illustrated A Day at Home in Early Modern England (2017), to Elaine Leong’s Recipes and Everyday Knowledge (2018), a focus on the ‘everyday’ has been established as an important area for new research.

Review Date: 12 January 2024

Historians of the Cold War have long relished the incongruous image of the infamous July 1959 ‘Kitchen Debate’ that saw Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon debate the merits of their respective philosophies in a model American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow’s Sokol’niki Park.

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.

Review Date: 25 August 2023

Sometimes (not often enough) an academic book comes along that ticks all the boxes: it is based on thorough research, spanning archives on different continents, engaging with rich and varied source materials; it is held together by a tight set of themes; it is written in beautiful prose.

Review Date: 11 May 2023

The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru have been published in 100 volumes. The first 15 volumes together make up the First Series, and the following 85 are the Second Series. These roughly cover the pre- and post-1946 periods and are thus divided by the formation of the interim government in India during the transfer of power from British rule.

Review Date: 21 April 2023

Catherine Carstairs’s new history, The Smile Gap: A History of Oral Health and Social Inequality, explores the changes in oral healthcare in Canada from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including patient voices, Carstairs considers oral health history from a number of angles.

Review Date: 05 April 2023

Cities of the Plain Cities of the Plain—not the ones in the Book of Genesis, but those scattered across Wallachia, between the southern Carpathians and the lower Danube. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, this territory was a borderland between Christian and Ottoman Europe.

Review Date: 27 January 2023

Between 1834 and 1917, some 1.37 million Indian migrants travelled the length and breadth of the British Empire under contracts of indentureship.

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.