Book review – History

Carnage on the home front: revisiting a forgotten disaster of the first world war

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Philip Hensher on a little-known episode of first world war history when a munitions factory in Kent exploded in April 1916, claiming over 100 lives

The romance of cycling is suggested in this advertisement for Columbia Bicycles, with its quotation from ‘Lochinvar’

Bicycling: the Marmite means of transport

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and…

British officers in a modern motor car drive against the current of horsemen of the Arab army entering Damascus on 1 October 1918. Anglo-Arab policies were equally at cross purposes following the fall of the city

The Ottoman empire: the last great casualty of the first world war

2 May 2015 9:00 am

In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…

John Knox (Photo: Getty)

John Knox: like the blast of 500 trumpets

2 May 2015 9:00 am

John Knox, Cranmer complained, was ‘one of those unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own…

Fatal attraction: a four-year-old picks her favourite handgun at the NRA’s annual meeting in Milwaukee, 2006

Americans and their gun culture: attached at the hip

25 April 2015 9:00 am

Like the documentary journalist Iain Overton, author of this book, I was taught to shoot and maintain a gun as…

An Armenian orphan in 1915. Hundreds of thousands of Christian women and children who survived the genocide suffered forced conversion to Islam

At last: a calm, definitive account of the Armenian genocide

18 April 2015 9:00 am

The atrocities suffered by an estimated one million Armenians in 1915 have been largely ignored by historians and officially denied by the Turks. It’s a centenary we can’t afford to neglect, says Justin Marozzi

The influence of money: a donor who helped build the fifth-century Basilica of Aquileia is commemorated in a mosaic portrait

Paying and praying: economics determined theology in the early Christian church

11 April 2015 9:00 am

Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…

As deadly as the male: female Russian pilots of the second world war were femmes fatales in every sense

11 April 2015 9:00 am

The name Lyuba Vinogradova may not ring any bells, but her ferrety eye for spotting a telling detail may already…

From Tom Brown’s School Days, illustrated by Thomas Hughes

A rebellion among Rugby schoolboys proved perfect training for its ringleader in putting down a Jamaican slave-rising in later life

28 March 2015 9:00 am

The public schools ought to have gone out of business long ago. The Education Act of 1944, which promised ‘state-aided…

The knives come out of the cabinet in Churchill’s wartime government

28 March 2015 9:00 am

Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston…

Baiting the trap with CHEESE: how we fooled the Germans in the second world war

28 March 2015 9:00 am

Second world war deception operations are now widely known, particularly those which misled the Germans into thinking that the D-Day…

William Hogarth’s ‘Night’, in his series ‘Four Times of the Day’ (1736), provides a glimpse of the anarchy and squalor of London’s nocturnal streets

Dickens’s dark side: walking at night helped ease his conscience at killing off characters

21 March 2015 9:00 am

James McConnachie discovers that some of the greatest English writers — Chaucer, Blake, Dickens, Wordsworth, Dr Johnson — drew inspiration and even comfort from walking around London late at night

A world beyond Grafton ‘Merriecolour’ beckons...

Sex, rebellion, ambition, prejudice: the story of 1950s women has it all

14 March 2015 9:00 am

Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn…

A print of girls in a gym from 1884

2,500 years of gyms (and you’re still better off walking the dog)

7 March 2015 9:00 am

My favourite fact about gyms before reading this book was that the average British gym member covers 468 miles per…

Isaak Israelevich Brodsky’s depiction of the execution of the ‘26 Martyrs’, painted in 1925 and already the stuff of Soviet legend

Murder in the dunes: the ‘26 Martyrs’ of Baku and the making of a Soviet legend

21 February 2015 9:00 am

In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the…

Admiral Dönitz, left in charge of the Reich after Hitler’s suicide, was lucky to have escaped the noose at Nuremberg

The madness of Nazism laid bare

14 February 2015 9:00 am

‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno…

The low sculduggery of high Victorian finance

7 February 2015 9:00 am

The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern…

‘Chelsea pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch’ by Sir David Wilkie

From prince to pauper: a dramatic overview of Britain on 18 June 1815

7 February 2015 9:00 am

Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way,…

The greatest American Arctic disaster

7 February 2015 9:00 am

In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships…

Virtually identical in their languorous loucheness. Clockwise from top left: Louise de Kérouaille Barbara Palmer, Moll Davis and Nell Gwyn

The merry monarch and his mistresses; was sex for Charles II a dangerous distraction?

31 January 2015 9:00 am

In a tone of breezy bravado in keeping with their concept of their subject’s character, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh…

The face of evil: Irma Grese, one of the most hated of all camp guards, trained at Ravensbrück before moving to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Survivors testified to her extreme sadism, including her use of trained, half-starved dogs to savage prisoners

Process of elimination: the horrors of Ravensbrück revealed

31 January 2015 9:00 am

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were originally set up in 1933 to terrorise Hitler’s political enemies; as war drew near,…

The Merchant (left) and the Physician from the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales

A window on Chaucer’s cramped, scary, smelly world

17 January 2015 9:00 am

Sam Leith describes the frequently lonely, squalid and hapless life of the father of English poetry

William Marshal: kingmaker — or just king of the joust?

17 January 2015 9:00 am

In February 1861 a 21-year-old French medievalist called Paul Meyer walked into Sotheby’s auction house near Covent Garden. He had…

An idealised view of a cotton plantation beside the Mississippi, c. 1880

The turbulent reign of King Cotton: the dark history of one of the world’s most important commodities

10 January 2015 9:00 am

If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…

Henry VIII, Edward VI, Charles I, George VI and George V

Game of thrones: five kings spanning five centuries launch a new series on royalty

3 January 2015 9:00 am

Nigel Jones reviews the first five titles to appear in a new series on British monarchs