Browse all reviews
No Return / Rowan Dorin
Review Date: 08 June 2023
It is hard to review this book without lapsing into the language of academic letters of recommendation: it is brilliant, illuminating. The genre is the Anglo-American 'book of the thesis’. This genre contrasts with that of first books from young German and French scholars in that the author has taken years to revise his 2015 Harvard thesis thoroughly.
The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain: Politics and Power Before the First World War / Vernon Bogdanor
Review Date: 28 February 2023
This magnum opus of 842 pages, plus notes, takes the reader from 1895, and the politics of Unionism, to the onset of the First World War. It deals with every subject a reader interested to understand modern Britain might want to know, from domestic questions like the rise of the Labour Party to imperial issues like Britain’s complex relationship with Japan.
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).
Public Opinion in Early Modern Scotland, c.1560-1707 / Karin Bowie
Review Date: 25 March 2022
This is Karin Bowie’s second book about the history of public opinion in Scotland. Her first, in 2007, examined the period 1699-1707 in depth, covering the debate leading up to the Union of Parliaments.(1) The present book deals with a longer period, and has no single focus like the Union.
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.
In the shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, locality and resistance / Shirin Hirsch
Review Date: 18 March 2022
In the spring of 1968, Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (p 1). In the shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, locality and resistance explores its aftermath, successfully synthesising histories of Powell as a political figure, the local community of Wolverhampton, and, to a lesser extent, the nation.The greatest strength of the book is its nuanced approach to this history.
The Crisis of the Meritocracy / Peter Mandler
Review Date: 11 March 2022
Britain has never been a meritocracy. Despite the concept’s widely-evoked vision of a ‘fair’ or ‘just’ social order, one where individuals rise or fall according to their ‘talents’ or ‘efforts’, the rise of the meritocracy has continually been scuppered by the perseverance of inherited privilege or democratic pressure.
Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)united Kingdom / eds. Naomi Lloyd-Jones, Margaret M. Scull
Review Date: 11 March 2022
Four Nations Approaches, as the editors acknowledge from the start, follows in the footsteps of a very solid tradition of edited collections, brought about by the rise of ‘New British History’ in the 1990s and early 2000s.
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’.