REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND This is a provocative book which will ruffle feathers, perhaps among some MHM readers. But it is also an important one. While the heart of The Great Defiance is historic, presenting an alternative narrative of what is often described as the ‘First’ British Empire, its central…
An old German proverb has it that ‘a great war leaves the country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.’ General Field Marshal ‘Bloody Ferdinand’ Schörner, commander of Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front in World War II, was…
Fabrizio Bagatti has made a major contribution to Lawrence of Arabia studies with the publication of this volume. Until now, we have had only the edited selection of his military dispatches published by Malcolm Brown or the facsimile reprint of the wartime Arab Bulletin. Lawrence was attached to the Arab…
I am always perplexed by political commentators who suggest that the possibility of Northern Ireland being reunited with Éire or Scotland becoming independent as a result of Brexit puts us in ‘uncharted waters’, and that the Union has never faced such challenges. That is nonsense: we have been here before,…
In his introduction to this exceptionally worthwhile volume, Stephen Robinson describes how, during the Gulf War, General Tommy Franks, a true believer in what had become the US Army’s dominant doctrine of ‘manoeuvre warfare’, formulated what historian Thomas Ricks referred to as ‘perhaps the worst war plan in American history’.…
London Clay is an impressionistic survey of London and its history, filtered through the prism of the underlying geological strata. It is at once personal and overarching, meandering from pre-Roman to Victorian, south London to north, via what Chivers (a poet by trade) calls ‘eight documentary essays’. Each essay tackles…
Is there room for another general history of early medieval Britain? The answer is ‘yes, of course’ when it is as fresh and interesting as this one. Its USP is that it examines the history of the different peoples of early medieval Britain alongside one another in both thematic and…
Cornwall is a county with a long military history, and reminders of its past can be found scattered across the landscape, ranging from Iron Age hillforts to Cold War control centres. Surrounded by sea on three sides, Cornwall has been building fortifications to resist foreign invaders for centuries, with castles…
Associated with the 2019 British Library exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: art, word, war, these 14 short essays demonstrate the specialised scholarship that lies behind the choice and description of items in such an exhibition. The contents of each closely focused chapter range chronologically from the Durham A II 10 Gospel Book…
The rapid suburban expansion of Inverness in recent decades has led to a patchwork of prehistoric sites being discovered through developer-funded excavations. In 2005, however, Headland Archaeology hit the motherlode at Culduthel. They had discovered a multi-period prehistoric site whose highlight was an extraordinary industrial and craftworking hub, active between…
Spanning roughly 1,100 years, this lively book is billed as ‘a romp across continents and kingdoms’, and it does not disappoint. Historian Eleanor Janega unpicks complex topics with verve, irreverent humour, and a scattering of pop-culture references, all accompanied by Neil Max Emmanuel’s striking and sharply observed illustrations. From the…
The Eurasian Steppe: People, Movement, Ideas is an ambitious scholarly volume tracing the origins of the European identity in the Eurasian steppe, the vast expanse of land that stretches from Hungary through to the Ural Mountains and China. Covering a period of 5,000 years, this is a bold account that…
Ancient Mesopotamian literature, written in cuneiform from around 3000 BC, is haunted by omens and ghosts. Most of the sources on ghosts come from the 1st millennium BC, written in Akkadian, but some texts and ideas hark back to even older texts written in Sumerian. Irving Finkel was first drawn…
Some time in the 8th century BC, with the Greek alphabet just decades old, two monumental poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, were committed to writing and so became the first great works of Western literature. We call their author Homer, but – even in antiquity – there was disagreement over…
The earliest recorded find from Piercebridge, the Roman crossing over the River Tees, was a stash of silver coins found in 1792. It was a hint of what would subsequently emerge when two divers, Rolfe Mitchinson and Bob Middlemass, began to explore the river in the 1980s. This book is…
Over the past 50 years or so, archaeologists have managed to hone their focus on several areas of Europe that show clear advances in social and ritual development: areas such as the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany, the Newgrange complex in Ireland, and, of course, the settlement and burial ritual…
To any well-read person, mention of Bath conjures up a Regency vision of elite spa bathing which makes it hard to think of the place as the abode of poverty or of industry. It is worth remembering that the eponymous wife of the Canterbury Tales is a cloth-maker who ‘passed…
It is always stimulating to be reminded how much more remains to be said about Hadrian’s Wall, a Roman frontier system that is often believed – from an archaeological perspective – to have been ‘done’. Despite centuries of scholarly scrutiny, there are key gaps in knowledge about every element of…
Ireland has been very well served in recent years by modern scholarship on her medieval castellated landscape. This book by O’Keeffe takes this research much further, especially in the way he rightly sets the castles within their greater European context. Not only does he support this hypothesis generally with both…
‘Helicopters flew in, and prices flew up.’ James Miller’s summary of the Chatsworth attic sale of 2010 sets the tone for much of Country House Collections, a fascinating series of meditations on the fate of the art-objects and artefacts that inhabited stately homes and gave them their character. The 14…
Back in the days when I was an undergraduate, I was introduced to the mystical world of social theory. My tutors – Christopher Tilley and, later, Michael Shanks – introduced me to an obscure branch of archaeology that I had never been exposed to. At that time, archaeology to me…