==History==
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{{newreview
|author=Elizabeth Cooke
|title=The Damnation of John Donellan: A Mysterious Case of Death and Scandal in Georgian England
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=Truth is stranger than fiction - but it is not always this gripping. The Boughtons of Lawford Hall, Warwickshire, have a colourful history, including the ghost of One-Handed Boughton, who haunted their land long before this new misfortune befell them. With marriages creating more branches of family, delicate relationships abound and help to shape the complex events detailed in the book. We begin with Sir Theodosius Boughton, heir to the estate when he comes of age, suffering from venereal disease. He is obliged to take medication and is well known for neglecting the recommendations of physicians. One fateful morning, he takes a new medicine, and dies in agony.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>184668482X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stacy Schiff
|summary=In deciding to write about political upheaval across Europe, including Russia, Alex Butterworth has chosen a massive topic for this entertaining book. So massive, in fact, that when I tried reading it without first looking through the pen pictures at the start of the main players I was quickly completely lost. My mistake – the short, sharp, pen pictures, which cover sixteen pages and detail all the major anarchists and secret agents are completely invaluable and helped my reading of the book enormously.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099551926</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Giles Milton
|title=Wolfram: The Boy Who Went To War
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=Giles Milton's daughter was set the task of designing an heraldic shield which represented the most important elements of her family's history. Aware that one of her grandparents is German she included the only German symbol which she knew: a Swastika. It was this incident, which was an awkward mixture of funny and disquieting which brought about 'Wolfram: The Boy Who Went To War'. It's the story of Giles' father-in-law, Wolfram Aïchele, who was nine years old when Hitler came to power and who found himself caught up in a situation which was none of his making and didn't accord with his own beliefs. He was a man who wanted to be a sculptor or to paint, but he was forced to become a soldier.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0340837888</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Dudley Green
|title=Patrick Bronte: Father of Genius
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=There have been many biographies about Charlotte Brontë and her siblings, but very little about their father. It is tempting to speculate whether he would be quite so deserving of one if he had not been the father of such a famous family. Yet Dudley Green, a retired Classics teacher, has demonstrated here that he did lead an interesting life himself. Born in rural Ireland in 1777, he spent his early years there before arriving in England in 1802 and settled in Yorkshire seven years later, where he remained the rest of his days.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752454455</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Edward B Barbier
|title=Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed Through Natural Resource Exploitation
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=Scarcity and Frontiers is an ambitious, fascinating book that examines how the world's economies have developed by exploiting natural resources. Throughout history, states have responded to natural resource scarcity by developing new frontiers, hence the title. The book begins with the development of agriculture along the banks of the Nile and runs right through to the present day, finally questioning whether we are entering a new era of natural resource scarcity.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521701651</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=John Ashdown-Hill
|title=The Last Days of Richard III
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=The controversy surrounding King Richard III has meant that there have been far more biographies about him than on any other pre-Tudor monarch, some extremely partisan in exonerating him of the crimes laid at his door, some (a minority, it seems) more than keen to endorse the Shakespearean portrait of a fiend in human shape, and others steering a middle course.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0752454048</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Helen Rappaport
|title=Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=The city of Ekaterinburg was once regarded as imperial Russia's gateway to the east. In 1918 it became symbolic with one of the most savage executions, or might one say liquidations, ever recorded in history – the cold-blooded annihilation of the former Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their children, the last remaining servants who had stayed with them in captivity, and their pet dogs.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099520095</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
|title=Edgelands
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Around the middle of the last century and earlier, books about the English countryside seemed very much in vogue. H.V. Morton's 'In Search of England' and associated titles spring readily to mind, but there were a wealth of others, by authors who seemed intent on discovering the land for themselves, sometimes anxious to document it before it was gone.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0224089021</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Jonathan Clark
|title=A World By Itself: A History of the British Isles
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=As one who has always felt most at ease with the standard chronological approach to history, driven by events and major personalities, I found the close-on 700 pages of this volume fairly demanding reading in places. It is divided into six parts, each by a different contributor with the editor himself writing the fourth. Each part is divided into Material Cultures, followed by essays on topics (not for all sections) on Religious Cultures; Religion, Nationalism and Identity; and Political and National Cultures. What we have, therefore, is an overview of events from each period, more thorough in some instances than others, and a certain amount of theorizing on the general social, political and even artistic background. A straightforward history through the ages – it is not.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0712664963</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Hart
|title=Gallipoli
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Early in 1915 the Allied Powers attempted to seize the Dardanelles, capture Constantinople and eliminate Turkey, who had joined the Central Powers, from the First World War. The campaign ended in failure and retreat, yet for many years it was portrayed as a brilliant strategy undermined by bad luck and incompetent commanders. This painstakingly-researched account shows that this was not the case. It was more a matter of a wild scheme which was poorly planned and doomed from the start, compounding the Allies' problems by diverting large numbers of troops from attacking Germans on the Western Front, where they would arguably have been better employed. In his introduction he calls the eight-month exercise 'an epic tragedy with an incredible heroic resilience displayed by the soldiers', yet ultimately 'a futile and costly sideshow for all the combatants.' It was a huge drain on Allied military resources, involving nearly half a million troops, with the British Empire losing about 205,000 – 115,000 killed, wounded or missing and 90,000 evacuated sick – while the French lost 47,000, and the Turkish over 251,000.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846681596</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Patrick Dillon and P J Lynch
|title=The Story of Britain
|rating=5
|genre=Children's Non-Fiction
|summary=Author Patrick Dillon has put together a clear, well-written and beautifully concise story of Britain, summing up the history of Britain and Ireland in a little over 320 pages. Significant events, ranging from the Norman Conquest to the South Sea Bubble, and groups of people ranging from highwaymen to the Romantic poets, are each dealt with in between 1 and 3 pages written in Dillon's chatty, easy to read style. There are also maps, including those of the D-Day landings and the Civil War battles, a timeline for each major period (Middle Ages, Tudors, Stuarts, Georgians, Victorians and Twentieth Century) and some gorgeous illustrations by former Kate Greenaway winner PJ Lynch.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1406311928</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Edward Pearce
|title=Pitt the Elder: Man of War
|rating=3.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham, and Prime Minister from 1766 to 1768, has come down to us through the ages as the great eighteenth century equivalent of Winston Churchill, one of the great men of the British Empire in its earlier days, and the man who led England triumphantly through the Seven Years War of 1756-63. During the 'year of victories' in 1759, Quebec was captured, the combined English and Prussian forces defeated the French at Minden, and the army won a famous victory at Quiberon Bay. For this, Pitt took – or was accorded by generations of historians – much of the credit.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1845951433</amazonuk>
}}