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.
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.
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…
Edith Sitwell: avant-garde poet, English genius / Richard Greene
Review Date: 07 March 2013
‘The Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry’, famously pronounced F. R. Leavis in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932).
Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham / C. Brad Faught
Review Date: 07 March 2013
Once upon a time, as every schoolboy knew, the history of the British Empire was the history of great men. Clive, Rhodes, Cromer, Curzon, Lugard, Milner: the names of these imperial pro-consuls, military leaders and administrative visionaries tripped off the tongue as paragons of the civilising and adventurous spirit which drove the expansion of England over three centuries and painted the globe pink.