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[[Category:New Reviews|History]]__NOTOC__ <!-- INSERT NEW REVIEWS BELOW HERE-->{{Frontpage|isbn=1785633457|title=Charging Around: Exploring the Edges of England by Electric Car|author=Clive Wilkinson|rating=History5|genre=Travel|summary=Clive Wilkinson has a history of travelling by unconventional means with a preference for slow travel. As he neared his eightieth birthday the idea of exploring the edges of England in an electric car was not totally outrageous. In fact, it should be a pleasant holiday for Clive and his wife, Joan, shouldn't it?__NOTOC__}}{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=B09BLBP3P8|title=Neville Chamberlain's War: How Great Britain Opposed Hitler, 1939-1940|author=Cathryn J PrinceFrederic Seager|rating=4.5|genre=History|titlesummary=Death in Received wisdom and simplified narrative often lead to misconceptions about history. One such is the scrubbing from the popular imagination of the Baltic: The early days of World War II Sinking from 1939-40, known as the ''Phoney War''. We remember Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, war breaking out, and Churchill coming in to save the day. Very little time is spent on this period in cultural reflections and yet, as Frederic Seager argues in this book, it was of vital significance in how the Wilhelm Gustloffwar played out.}}{{Frontpage|isbn=3756228711|title=CDC: The happy years with a spectacular IT 'Phenomena'|author=Hans Bodmer

|summary=There is no pun intended when I describe the ship ''Wilhelm GustloffThe history of the development of IT could fill books of several hundred pages.'' as stern Author Hans Bodmer is quite right about that. It just seems from looking at her hard and rigid lines that if you were He has chosen to design a ship that tell us about the Nazi party would use as an ideological toolshort, but explosive, to take their favoured workers on pleasure cruises around history of the MediterraneanControl Data Company, CDC, you would naturally end up with something that looked like herfor whom he worked. However fate had it that within years she became It's a hospital shipfascinating tale, and it wasn't much longer after that that she was stationed in the northern Polish port now known as Gdynia, ready to help told in a major evacuation of thousands mixture of desperate, starving technological summary and fevered people fleeing the advancing Soviet armywry anecdote. All they wanted to do was to avoid the perilous snowy overland route to get a few miles along the coast, but they weren't to know that within hours of sailing the ''Wilhelm Gustloff'' would be torpedoed, and many thousands would perish in the near-frozen Baltic waters.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>023034156X</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Peter FrankopanJeremy Dronfield and David Ziggy Greene|title=The First Crusade: The Call from the EastFritz and Kurt|rating=3.54|genre=HistoryConfident Readers|summary=At We start with the now famous Council pair of Clermont brothers Fritz and Kurt, and their muckers, doing things any Jewish lad in November 1095, Pope Urban II responded 1930s Vienna would want to calls of distress from do – kicking things around the eastern Byzantine Empire by issuing empty market place, helping the dramatic call neighbours, being dutiful when it comes to arms that sparked the First Crusadesynagogue choir and at a vocational school. But there Kurt has to make sure the lamps are turned on at least two sides their very Orthodox neighbours' each Friday night – the Sabbath preventing them for using anything nearly as mechanical and workmanlike as a light switch. But this is the time just before the Austrian leader is going to cave to every storyHitler's will, and instead of having a national vote to keep the Nazis out, especially invite them in historywith open arms. Western histories ''Kristallnacht'' happened in Vienna just as much as in Germany, as did all the round-ups of Jews. These in their turn leave the Crusades have concentrated on that Council younger Kurt at home with his mother and sisters anxious to hear word of an evacuation to Britain or the journeys of Crusaders across Europe: Peter Frankopan's 'The Call from US, while Fritz and his father are, unknown initially to each other, packed off on the East' instead draws attention same train to Emperor Alexios I Komnenus Buchenwald and the plight stone quarry there. And us wondering how the titular event for the adult variant of his Byzantine Empire.all this could come about…|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099555034</amazonuk>024156574X

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Christopher de BellaigueJohn Henry Phillips|title=Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British CoupThe Search

|summary=A good historian will take a single important fact and make good use of it to expound his general thesis. De Bellaigue demonstrates this masterfully Archaeology cannot be child's play, when he states, you'Between 1876 and 1915 a quarter of re scraping in the world changed ownershipdirt looking to find what you can find, with a half a dozen European states taking the lion’s shareoften knowing there should be something there but not always confident what.' Persia, however, during this time was judged to Archaeology must be too poor a fair bit harder when you set out to be worth occupyingfind some specific thing. It had, for instance, only This book is a few miles case of railway track. Secondlythe latter, Russia and Britain both had schemes for control but their mutual animosity gave as our author promises to locate the topic of the Persians room titular search. And he really hasn't made it easy for manoeuvre. The latter were skilled at playing each off against himself – the other and obtaining concessions. Howeversearch area is a wide one, the conflict sharpened over the control of a critical resourcetarget might not exist any more – oh, and it's underwater, oilwhen he cannot dive. This was controlled upon Latching on to a particular D-Day veteran through helping the outbreak of the First World War by the major share held in the Anglo-Persian Oil Companyheroic old man's visit back to France, later our author has promised to become BP, held by find the British. It was Muhammad Mossadeghlanding craft that delivered him to Normandy, one of the first liberals of the Middle East and that he was determined that this resource lucky to survive when it sank from beneath his native land had him. The secondary aim is to belong erect a memorial to his own peopleeveryone else aboard, the vast majority of whom perished.Who else would make such promises to someone in their nineties?|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>0099540487</amazonuk>1472146182

{{Frontpage|isbn= B09F4CTKJR|title= Flights for Freedom|author= Steven Burgauer|rating=4.5|genre=Historical Fiction|summary=It's the later stages of World War I and the United States has just entered the conflict. Petrol Petronus is a young American who has signed up and joined the 17 Aero Squadron. This company was the first US Aero Squadron to be trained in Canada, the first to be attached to the RAF and the first to be sent into the skies to fight the Germans in active combat. But before that can happen, Petrol has to master flying the notoriously difficult but majestic Sopwith Camel.}}{{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Marc Morris0578761718|title=The Norman ConquestInspiring History of a Special Relationship|author=Nancy Carver

|summary=When did the Norman conquest The church of England start and end? This generous panoramic history takes a wide sweep of almost St Mary Aldermanbuy had existed in the whole City of the eleventh century London from at least 1181, when it was first mentioned in Englandrecords. Sadly, although as the title indicates, original church was destroyed in the focal point is that pivotal date Great Fire of 1066London in 1666. Morris begins his narrative at around It was rebuilt in Portland stone from a design by Sir Christopher Wren soon after the year 1000fire and then survived for centuries until World War II, a time when it was again ruined by bombs during the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were under threat from Blitz. But that wasn't the end of its story: after a phenomenal fundraising effort, the Viking invasions stones from Alfred and Ethelred the Unreadychurch's walls were transported to Fulton, Missouri. Having long been vulnerable to raids from ScandinaviaThere, in the grounds of Westminster College, England then had the church was rebuilt and today serves as a memorial to contend with the same from FranceWinston Churchill. }}{{Frontpage|isbn=1784385166|title=The power struggles Third Reich in 100 Objects: A Material History of Nazi Germany|author=Roger Moorhouse|rating=5|genre=History|summary=What is the first image that followed the illness and death comes to mind when you think of the childless Edward the Confessor (who had nominated William Third Reich? Hitler? A swastika? The Nazi salute? The gate to a concentration camp? None of Normandy as his preferred successor in 1051), the apparent seizure these are comfortable images but they are emblematic of the English throne by Harold Godwinson who then had himself crowned with remarkable hasteThird Reich's fascist regime in all its iniquity. But some objects and images from that time may be less familiar to you. In this short volume, Roger Moorhouse has attempted to illustrate the invasion led by Harold’s brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada period of Norway and the death Third Reich through one hundred of both the latter at Stamford Bridge, are dealt with in painstaking detailits material artefacts.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099537443</amazonuk> 

 {{newreviewFrontpage|author=Jerry WhiteLun Zhang, Adrien Gombeaud, Ameziane and Edward Gauvin (translator)|title=London in the 18th centuryTiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes

|genre=HistoryGraphic Novels|summary=White has already written accounts I never really followed the events of London Tiananmen Square with much attention when it was playing out – someone in the 19th and 20th centuriessecond half of their teens has other priorities, and this is the last in a planned trilogyyou know. In 1700, according to an unnamed contemporary source, it was one I certainly didn't know of the ‘most Spacious, Populous, Rich, Beautiful, Renowned weeks of protests and Noble Citys that we know of at this day in hunger strikes from the World’. It was also students before the largest city in Europe. By massacre and the end birth of the centuryTank Man image, it would double in extent and populationI didn't know how the area had long been a venue for political protest, and become the largest in I didn't know more than a spit about the universepeople involved on either side. Carl Phillipp Moritz, This book is practically flawless in giving a visitor from Germany in 1782, could climb St Paulgeneral browser's Cathedral and comment with amazement that he found it impossible to ascertain where London began or ended, ‘or where context for the circumjacent villages began; far as the eye could reach, it seemed to be all one continued chain’whole season of protests back in 1989.|amazonukisbn=<amazonuk>1847921809</amazonuk>1684056993

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Catherine Fletcher0648684806|title=The Divorce of Henry VIIIClara Colby: The Untold StoryInternational Suffragist|author=John Holliday

|summary=Henry VIII’s protracted divorce from Catherine of AragonIt was December and Esther Rutter was stuck in her office job, often referred writing to as ‘The King’s Great Matter’, has been described in detail many times beforepeople she'd never met and preparing spreadsheets. The job frustrated her and even her knitting did not soothe her mind. In this book on January was going to be a time for making changes and she decided that she would travel the length and breadth of the subjectBritish Isles with occasional forays abroad, discovering and telling the focus is on the role story of Italian diplomat, Gregorio Casali, ‘our man in Rome’, as wool's history and how it had made and changed the hardback edition was titledlandscape. In She'd grown up on a sheep farm in Suffolk - '' a free-range child on the prefacefarm'' - and learned to spin, Ms Fletcher explains that the average reader may be conversant with the basic facts of Henry knit and weave from her mother and his six wives, but has probably never heard of Casali, who played a lengthy role her mother's friend. This was in the proceedingsher blood.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099554895</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Pam Weaver1789017977|title=Bath Times Ronnie and Nursery RhymesHilda's Romance: Towards a New Life after World War II|author=Wendy Williams

|genre=AutobiographyHistory|summary=In 1961, a young 16 year old girl called Pam Weaver embarks on a career path that will change her life. Fed up with Ronnie Williams was the tedium son of working on the broken biscuit counter at Woolworths, she decides to train for her NNEBThomas Henry Williams (known as Harry) and Ethel Wall. There's some doubt as to whether or not they were ever married or even Harry'Bath Times s birthdate: he claimed to have been born in 1863, but he was already many years older than Ethel and Nursery Rhymes'' sees Pam progress from he might well have shaved a few years off his age. For a shy while the family was quite well-to-do but disaster struck in the 1929 Depression and awkward teenager five-year-old Ronnie had to adjust to a competent and caring nursery nursevery different lifestyle. Reluctant One thing he did inherit from his father was his need to be well-turned-out and this would stay too long in any position, Pam tries her hand with him throughout his life. He joined the army at a variety of jobs, including her initial employment in a Council-run children’s home, working as a private nanny to a rich young widow and an eventful but emotional stint eighteen in a premature baby ward1942.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0007488440</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Derek Niemann1980891117|title=Birds G Engleheart Pinxit 1805: A year in a Cagethe life of George Engleheart|author=John Webley

|summary=Melanie Martin read about what happened to Dutch Jews in occupied Amsterdam during World War II and was entranced by what she discovered, particularly in ''The Diary of Ann Frank'Birds in a Cage'but then realised that her own family' introduces s stories were equally fascinating. A hundred and seven thousand Jews were deported from the city during the reader to John and his fellow officers: Peter Conderwar years, George Waterston and John Henry Barrett but only five thousand survived and shows Martin could not understand how their shared love of birds enabled them this could be allowed to happen in a country with liberal values who were resistant to create an emotional escape from German occupation. Most people believed that the gruelling conditions occupation could never happen: even those who thought that surrounded them in the prisoner of war camp at Warburg. The men banded together to form a birdwatching society within Germans might reach the campcity were convinced that they would soon be pushed back, making meticulous observations of that the lives of the birds nesting Amsterdammers would never allow what happened to escalate in and around the area. These detailed records went on to become valuable scientific documentsway that it did, but initial protests melted away as they recorded the lives and habits organisers became more circumspect. It's an atrocity on a vast scale but made up of tens of thousands of birds in painstaking detail, revealing previously unknown facts about species such as the redstart and goldfinchindividual tragedies.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1780720939</amazonuk>

{{Frontpage|isbn=1908745819|title=Surfacing|author=Kathleen Jamie|rating=5|genre=History|summary=Sometimes when people suggest that you read a certain book, they tell you ''this one has your name on it''. Mostly we take them at their word, or not, but rarely do we ask them why they thought so unless it turns out that we didn't like the book. That's a rare experience. People who are sensitive to hearing a book calling your name, rarely get it wrong. In this case, I was told why. The blurb speaks of the author considering ''an older, less tethered sense of herself.'' Older. Less tethered. That's not a bad description of where I am. Add to that my love of the natural world, of those aspects of the poetic and lyrical that are about style not form, and substance most of all, about connection. Of course, this book had my name on it. It was written for me. It would have found its way to me eventually. I am pleased to have it fall onto my path so quickly.}}{{newreviewFrontpage|isbn=0857058320|title=Lord Of All the Dead|author=Oliver Stone Javier Cercas and Peter KuznickAnne McLean (translator)|rating=4|genre=History|titlesummary=''Lord Of All the Dead'' is a journey to uncover the author's lost ancestor's life and death. Cercas is searching for the meaning behind his great uncle's death in the Spanish Civil War. Manuel Mena, Cercas' great uncle, is the figure who looms large over the book. He died relatively young whilst fighting for Francisco Franco's forces. Cercas ruminates on why his uncle fought for this dictator. The Untold History question at the centre of this book is whether it is possible for his great uncle to be a hero whilst having fought for the United Stateswrong side. }}{{Frontpage|isbn=0008294011|title=How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship|author=Ece Temelkuran

|summary=It's been said A little while ago a friend asked me if I thought that history is written by the victors. It we were living through what in years to come would also be pertinent to add that discussed by A level history students when faced with the writing will always polish up the worthy parts whilst whilst finding a convenient carpet under which can be swept question ''Discuss the events factors which are best forgottenled to... '' ThereI agreed that she was right and wasn's no country with t certain whether it was a victory under its belt which is above good or bad thing that we didn't know what all 'this practice: ' was leading to. I've just been brought up very sharply as think now that I considered the Irish potato famine from the [[The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy by Tim Pat Coogan|Irish perspective]]do know. ThatWe are in danger of losing democracy and whilst it's a story youflawed system I can'll not read in many British history books. The majority t think of British people would accept though that their country has had an imperialist past - and that a better one, particularly as the natives have not always thrown themselves down in front of us in their joy at our arrival'benevolent dictator' is as rare as hen's teeth.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0091949297</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Jacob F Field1788037812|title=One Bloody Thing After AnotherThe Fraternity of the Estranged: The Fight for Homosexual Rights in England, 1891-1908|author=Brian Anderson|rating=3.5

|summary=While other authors have Originally passed in 1885, the law that had made the case homosexual relations a crime remained in place for mankind easing off in 82 years. But during this time, restrictions on same-sex relationships did not go unchallenged. Between 1891 and 1908, three books on the destruction stakes recently, nature of homosexuality appeared. They were written by two homosexual men: Edward Carpenter and becoming less hostileJohn Addington Symonds, bloodthirsty as well as the heterosexual Havelock Ellis. Exploring the margins of society and cruel than in studying homosexuality was common on the past, it doesn’t mean that our global history is not littered with detailEuropean Continent, but barely talked about mutiniesin the UK, massacres and murders. Mr Field here gathers so the gamut publications of gore from the time when the only people writing down their history these men were hugely significant – contributing to the Chinesescientific understanding of homosexuality, up until and beginning the late nineteenth centurystruggle for recognition and equality, and covers leading to the planet milestone legalisation of same-sex relationships in search of slicing, dicing and deathly devices. It certainly lives up to its title1967.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843178842</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Graeme Donald1910593508|title=When the Earth Was FlatApollo|author=Matt Fitch, Chris Baker and Mike Collins|rating=45

|summary=Mankind has often had some quite ridiculous ideas. Once upon This incredible graphic novel is a time people deemed it sensible for doctors love letter to go from an autopsy room to help give birth without washing hands in between – who'd have thought it might be beneficial? Those self-same medical scientists were within generations going to extol the virtues of cocaine Moon landings and opium as harmless boosts to medicinethe passion for the subject drips off every Apollo by Matt Fitch, Chris Baker and Mike Collins. This is a story we know well and because of this, the authors take a few narrative shortcuts knowing that we can fill in the interim proudly induce enemas of tobacco smoke – blanks. These shortcuts are the only downside to the early version book. If you've ever read a comic book adaptation of colonic irrigation so beloved of some dodgy ex-Princess-type people. Outside a film you will be familiar with the medical room, slight feeling that there was once the notion are scenes missing and that the Earth was flat – although not as might be popularly believed, dialogue has been trimmed. This is a regular idea in Columbus's days, but certainly at graphic novel that could easily have been three times before then. The spread of man's idiocy where wrong, faulty as long and dodgy science is concerned, and the history of all the false ideas, is touched on in this fascinating volumestill felt too short.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1843178680</amazonuk>

 {{newreviewFrontpage|authorisbn=Tim Pat Coogan1786331047|title=The Famine PlotRace to Save the Romanovs: EnglandThe Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue Russia's Role in Ireland's Greatest TragedyImperial Family|author=Helen Rappaport|rating=4.5

|summary=The great famine basic facts about the deaths of Ireland in the 1840s was a major disaster Nicholas and a tragedy. As a resultAlexandra, about a million some of its citizens died from starvation and a further million emigratedwhich were deliberately obscured at the time for various reasons, with so many perishing en route that it was said ''you can walk dry shod to America on their bodieshave long since been established.'' The net total was about a quarter For the last few months of their lives in Russia the existing population. Yet as Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan argues former Tsar and Tsarina, their children and few remaining servants were held in this accountincreasingly squalid, the famine was more than a tragedyhumiliating captivity. The title indicates a fierce polemicTo prevent them from being rescued, and in July 1918 the thrust of his book is that the British government of the day was not merely responsible for exacerbating the famine conditions through mismanagement revolutionary regime had them all shot and failure to respond adequately bayoneted to death in circumstances which, once the failure of the potato cropnews was confirmed beyond all doubt, but in fact deliberately engineered a food shortage horrified their relatives in what was one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansingEurope.|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230109527</amazonuk>