Newest History Reviews
The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut's Mummy by Jo Marchant
Now, if I'd known
They'd line up just to see him,
I'd taken all my money
And bought me a museum.
These lyrics, taken from a popular Steve Martin song, perfectly epitomize a phenomenon first described in the New York Times, February 1923. The craze came to be known as Tut-Mania and even now, ninety years later, there is something about the boy-king with the golden mask that ignites the imagination and curiosity of each subsequent generation. Full review...
The Last Battle by Stephen Harding
May 4, 1945 saw the unconditional surrender of all German troops in Germany in Northwest Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Bavaria. Berlin had surrendered two days earlier. A few more areas remained officially at war, but even the most diehard supporter must have realised Germany had fallen. The war was over, to most soldiers, although VE day would be delayed for a few more days. But the most implausible battle of the second world war was about to begin. Had The Last Battle been fiction, I would have scoffed at the unlikely alliance featured in this book as too unbelievable. A final battle played out in isolated Austrian castle was to rescue French VIPs held as honour prisoners. They were to be protected by the oddest ensemble of soldiers ever known. A ranking member of the S.S., a decorated Wehrmacht officer and his troops, the Austrian resistance and a few American soldiers against a suicidal S.S. troop bent on carrying as many killings as possible before the inevitable end. Full review...
The Riddle of the Labyrinth by Margalit Fox
Meet Linear B. It's the name given to an ancient writing system discovered in 1900, and has stuck ever since then. If you need to know more, it's a linear style of writing, and is linked to Linear A. There, that's that cleared up. But it took an awful long time to clear anything more up – while people knew some things about Linear B, and why and how they got to be holding it in their hands, the actual language it contained, and its meaning, was a truly intellectual challenge. It was five whole decades of obscurity, annoyingly secretive archaeologists and more, between Sir Arthur Evans finding Linear B on copious clay tablets on Crete, and its interpretation. In between those two landmarks was an unsung American heroine, and this book is both an incredibly readable guide to everything regarding Linear B, and a study of her contribution. Full review...
Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein - the Battle that Turned the Tide by Jonathan Dimbleby
El Alamein is a totemic British battle, standing as it does with others which turned the tide of our fortunes. The Allies were still smarting from the effects of Dunkirk and harbouring the knowledge that had Hitler elected to press his advantage then the situation could have been very different. Churchill is often quoted as saying that there were no victories before El Alamein and no defeats afterwards. This isn't true - 'it seemed that' is generally omitted from the beginning of the quote - but it does sum up the fact that the battle turned the tide of perception as well as the fortunes of war, which was quite an achievement for fighting which took place on land to which none of the major participants had any legitimate claim. Full review...
Ruta's Closet by Keith Morgan with Ruth Kron Sigal
A Holocaust memoir. There, I've said it, and in one fell swoop I've consigned this book to a niche market, and a small – and very much over-supplied – audience. Such books do find it difficult to get their heads above the parapet and the voice within heard, and it seems they have slowly filled in all the gaps in the available knowledge about the Holocaust. But that's the point that makes those words sound churlish – every life that survived that nightmare has to fill in a gap, and account for those who committed the crimes and those that helped out and rescued a survivor, and serve as monument to those six million gaps it created. Luckily, mostly on account of location, this book certainly does serve to fill in a wider gap in our perception of WWII than most. Full review...
The Double Cross System by J C Masterman
This Vintage re-issue of Masterman's account of the work of the Twenty Committee is subtitled the 'classic account of World War Two Spy-Masters'. That's a somewhat misleading tease. The book isn't really about the spy-masters, very little information is given about those recruiting, turning, running and protecting the spies. More information - but again relatively little - is given about the spies themselves. Full review...
First Class: A History of Britain in 36 Postage Stamps by Chris West
As a philatelist and lover of history, I approached this book with even more curiosity than usual. The subtitle suggested a very intriguing approach, but would it work? I’m glad to report that it did. Full review...
A History of Cricket in 100 Objects by Gavin Mortimer
A History of Football in 100 Objects was a brave attempt, but was slightly let down by being a little too clinical. Being a game imbued with passion, the book lacked this which took some of the edge off it. Cricket, whilst inspiring passion amongst devotees, has a slightly more laid back following; one that may work better in this format. That said, being a game that has been played for five centuries, narrowing it down to just 100 objects is no less an undertaking than for football. Full review...
The Society of Timid Souls: Or, How to be Brave by Polly Morland
'I see no reason why the shy and timid in any community couldn’t get together and help each other.'
The above words were uttered in 1943 by a gentleman called Bernard Gabriel. Mr Gabriel was a piano player who founded a unique club, The Society of Timid Souls that encouraged timid performers and fear-wracked musicians to come in out of the cold 'to play, to criticise and be criticised in order to conquer that old bogey of stage fright.' The method evidently worked, as many a timid soul claimed to be cured by these unorthodox methods and club membership grew considerably in the years that followed. Full review...
The Spirit of Venice: From Marco Polo to Casanova by Paul Strathern
There are several ways of telling the history of the republic of Venice, which is generally regarded as the first great economic and naval power of the western world. Strathern has chosen to do so largely through the lives of various famous (and also infamous) people from Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century to what he calls its destruction, 'both political and symbolic', at the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. On the whole, the major events such as its wars are covered fairly briefly. An exception, fittingly enough, is made in the case of a chapter on the war which began its decline in the fifteenth century, when it tried to hold Thessalonica against the Ottomans, and sent ships to help defend Constantinople against the Turkish army but found itself heavily defeated in the subsequent lengthy war, as a result of which it lost most of its possessions. Full review...
The Great War by Peter Hart
There are certain aspects of world history that we are duty-bound to teach to each generation. World War I was called 'The Great War' for a reason; it changed the world scene irrevocably and is regarded as the single most important event of the twentieth century. The war introduced dreadful new weapons designed to slaughter as many people as possible with maximum efficiency, resulting in tens of millions of deaths. Full review...
Made to last: The story of Britain's best-known shoe firm by Mark Palmer
From its founding by the Quaker brothers Cyrus and James Clark in the Somerset village of Street, to its present-day status as a global shoe brand, the name of Clark has weathered many a storm as it draws close to its bicentenary. This account of the company, by a distant kinsman of the two original founders, has drawn heavily on the archives and on in-depth interviews with the family to tell the full story. Full review...
Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours by Emily Cockayne
As Emily Cockayne emphasises at the beginning of the first chapter, almost everyone has a neighbour; if you have a neighbour, you are one yourself; and neighbours can enrich or ruin our lives. In this engaging book, she takes various case studies and anecdotes of living side by side in Britain from around 1200 to the present day. Full review...
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer
For many of us, the Elizabethan age which comprised almost half of the Tudor era seems bathed in sunlight, the gilded era of Queen Elizabeth's 'sceptred isle'. It was the period in which Gloriana presided over Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the literary epoch of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney. Full review...
Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder
In emulating historians from his geographical area of interest, Timothy Snyder poses questions to, and discusses ideas with, the highly esteemed British historian and writer Tony Judt, best known for his 2005 Postwar. This collaboration of the older and the younger thinker engenders the spoken book Thinking the Twentieth Century, a rather intriguing exploration of said time period. Each of its ten chapters begins with Judt’s narrative of a specific point in his personal life, and continues into debates of specific facets of history; a healthy mix of thematic and chronological approaches is used for the latter. Full review...
Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by Cathryn J Prince
There is no pun intended when I describe the ship Wilhelm Gustloff as stern. It just seems from looking at her hard and rigid lines that if you were to design a ship that the Nazi party would use as an ideological tool, to take their favoured workers on pleasure cruises around the Mediterranean, you would naturally end up with something that looked like her. However fate had it that within years she became a hospital ship, and it wasn't much longer after that that she was stationed in the northern Polish port now known as Gdynia, ready to help in a major evacuation of thousands of desperate, starving and fevered people fleeing the advancing Soviet army. 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. Full review...
The First Crusade: The Call from the East by Peter Frankopan
At the now famous Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II responded to calls of distress from the eastern Byzantine Empire by issuing the dramatic call to arms that sparked the First Crusade. But there are at least two sides to every story, especially in history. Western histories of the Crusades have concentrated on that Council and the journeys of Crusaders across Europe: Peter Frankopan's 'The Call from the East' instead draws attention to Emperor Alexios I Komnenus and the plight of his Byzantine Empire. Full review...
Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
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 when he states, 'Between 1876 and 1915 a quarter of the world changed ownership, with a half a dozen European states taking the lion’s share.' Persia, however, during this time was judged to be too poor to be worth occupying. It had, for instance, only a few miles of railway track. Secondly, Russia and Britain both had schemes for control but their mutual animosity gave the Persians room for manoeuvre. The latter were skilled at playing each off against the other and obtaining concessions. However, the conflict sharpened over the control of a critical resource, oil. This was controlled upon the outbreak of the First World War by the major share held in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later to become BP, held by the British. It was Muhammad Mossadegh, one of the first liberals of the Middle East was determined that this resource beneath his native land had to belong to his own people. Full review...
