Browse all reviews
The Lone Protestor: A M Fernando in Australia and Europe / Fiona Paisley
Review Date: 11 April 2013
Tracing the path of an Australian Aboriginal political activist through four decades of early 20th–century Europe must surely have been a challenging and often surprising task.
First Lady of Fleet Street: A Biography of Rachel Beer / Yehuda Koren, Eilat Negev
Review Date: 11 April 2013
Rachel Beer first caught my attention some 20 years ago when I was trawling through Who Was Who looking for journalists. She was unusual because she was the editor of The Sunday Times in the 1890s, when no other national newspaper had a woman editor.
Cosmo Lang. Archbishop in War and Crisis / Robert Beaken
Review Date: 11 April 2013
'I HATE Cosmo Lang!’ exclaimed a member of the audience when Robert Beaken spoke to a seminar at the IHR about Lang, archbishop of Canterbury and subject of this important reassessment. As Beaken rightly notes, Lang’s reputation has suffered in the years since his death.
Witness to History: The Life of John Wheeler-Bennett / Victoria Schofield
Review Date: 21 March 2013
In 1929, Major-General (retired) Sir Neill Malcolm advised the 27-year-old J. W.
George F. Kennan: An American Life / John Lewis Gaddis
Review Date: 21 March 2013
‘No one knows what George Kennan really meant [to say]!’ So did the late McGeorge Bundy, my then professor, initiate me and a half a dozen other graduate students into mystery of George Frost Kennan. I say ‘mystery’ deliberately, as both at the time and later, there was indeed something distinctly odd about two aspects of the life and career of the one-time scholar-diplomat.
Kaia, Heroine of the 1944 Warsaw Rising / Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm
Review Date: 21 March 2013
This is a very personal book, first published in Polish in 2006. The author, Aleksandra Ziolkowska-Boehm, tells the story of Cezaria Ilyin Szymańska, a personal friend who participated in the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Kaia is the name under which the heroine is known to her friends.
Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson / Tom Sibley, Roger Seifert
Review Date: 14 March 2013
Bert Ramelson, one of the leading figures of the post-war Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Party’s Industrial Organiser during the era of heightened industrial militancy in the 1960s and 1970s, has been a widely debated person in the historiography of the CPGB, but a new biography by Roger Seifert and Tom Sibley attempts to reassess the characterisations of Ramelson by other authors.
The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe / Nwando Achebe
Review Date: 14 March 2013
The Female King of Colonial Nigeria is the story of a woman, Ahebi Ugbabe, who rose from the status of a local girl and commercial sex worker to that of a village headman, a warrant chief and a king. Ahebi was born in Enugu-Ezike, an Igbo community, in the late 19th century.
A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century / Ann Oakley
Review Date: 14 March 2013
Who?Who first suggested community service as an alternative to imprisonment in Britain? Who got the Bill to abolish capital punishment on the statute book? Who chaired a commission on drugs which recommended reducing penalties for cannabis possession in 1966? Who indeed was the first woman to be a member of a national policy commission in 1924, go as a delegate to a League of Nations World…
A Victorian Gentleman & Ethiopian Nationalist: the life and times of Hakim Warqenah, Dr Charles Martin / Peter Garretson
Review Date: 07 March 2013
Peter Garretson’s biography of Warqenah Eshete – Ethiopian statesman, diplomat and occasional businessman – is nothing if not meticulous: drawing extensively on Warqenah’s own autobiography and diary, Garretson succeeds in gathering an enormous amount of detail on the myriad stages of the man’s life and doings, personal and professional.