Water in the Roman World: engineering, trade, religion, and daily life

Review by Dylan K Rogers To say that the Roman world was overflowing with water is an understatement. Recently, scholarship has increasingly begun to explore the numerous ways water impacted the lives of ancient Romans, from understanding the design of aqueducts in the countryside to the social impact that fountains…

The Mosaics of Alexandria: pavements of Greek and Roman Egypt

Review by Helen Whitehouse Originally published in French (Mosaïques d’Alexandrie: pavements d’Égypte grecque et romaine, 2019), this handsome volume now appears in an excellent English translation by Colin Clement. Excavations in Alexandria, on land and at sea, over the last 40 years have revealed more material evidence of the Ptolemaic…

The Path of Peace: walking the Western Front Way

REVIEW by TOBY CLARK During the First World War, a young soldier called Douglas Gillespie used a letter home from the trenches to expound on an idea for remembering the dead after the fighting was over. Gillespie proposed a path from the English Channel to Switzerland, following the route of…

Dictionary of Fortifications

REVIEW by DAVID FLINTHAM Until relatively recently, there were more terms relating to fortifications than to probably any other area of military history. Confusion is easy, especially since many of the words and phrases come directly from languages other than English. Jean-Denis Lepage has set himself the challenge of identifying…

Demetrius: sacker of cities

REVIEW by MARC DeSANTIS The death of Alexander the Great in Babylon in 323 BC left the empire he had conquered without blood heirs ready to take up the heavy burden of governance. Thus, in the days following his passing, that task was left to a small group of Macedonian…

Mercy: humanity in war

REVIEW: CALUM HENDERSON The new German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which arrived on Netflix last autumn, pulls no punches in its depiction of the savage violence of World War I. In the film, helpless young men are cut to pieces by machine-guns, buried…

Ireland and the Crusades

Review by Michael Potterton Thirty years ago, when I was a history and archaeology undergraduate at University College Dublin, the phrase ‘Ireland and the Crusades’ seemed almost as absurd as ‘Ireland and the Palaeolithic’ or ‘Ireland and the Renaissance’. Times change, of course, and thankfully all three have become fruitful…

Dictionary of Fortifications: an illustrated glossary

Review by David Flintham From Iron Age hillforts to Second World War pillboxes, fortifications are all around us. Yet there are probably more terms relating to fortifications than anything else in military history. Author Jean-Denis Lepage has challenged himself to explain terms from more than 3,000 years of defensive architecture,…

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East

Review by Diana Bentley The ancient Near East has not always attracted the popular attention it deserves, especially in comparison with other cultures of the surrounding area, like Greece, Rome, and Egypt. This latest work by Amanda H Podany, Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic University, should certainly…

A Grand Spell of Sunshine: The Life and Legacy of Francis Frith

Review: Hilary Forrest Many readers will be familiar with the name Francis Frith, which is associated with the world of picture postcards, often of seaside views or famous sights. What you will discover from this fascinating and detailed work is that Frith was not only a pioneer in the relatively…

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