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…
The Rosetta Stone that proved key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, discovered by a French military engineer in 1799 (now in the British Museum), and the gold mask of Tutankhamun, discovered by British Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1922 (now in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum), are generally considered the world’s most-famous…
The defeated German soldiers who returned from the Second World War were so broken by the conflict that a specific term for them emerged. Heimkehrer were, according to Harald Jähner, battered survivors who returned to a society which they no longer recognised. Nowhere was this more evident than at home.…
The sleepy village of Repton in south Derbyshire seems like an unlikely starting point for a voyage halfway around the world. But it is here that Cat Jarman begins her brilliant new history of the Vikings. In 873, Repton was the site of a massacre by the Great Viking Army.…
Hitler’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 – Operation Barbarossa – initiated a campaign of epic proportions. While the format of recounting a campaign through the recollections of individual participants is well established, the author does an exceptionally good job of using a host of letters and diary entries…
I headed for the battlefield monument to get my bearings – an obelisk erected in 1740 to mark the spot where Warwick the Kingmaker, the greatest figure of the Wars of the Roses, was supposedly cut down...…
Few events in military history have been picked over as much as Operation Market Garden, now notorious only because it resulted in a German victory when it was believed that, halfway through 1944, German victories were a thing of the past. With The Devil’s Bridge, Anthony Tucker-Jones has given us…
• Paths of Fire: the gun and the world it made
• Pathfinders
• The Viking Great Army and the Making of England
• SBS: Silent Warriors
• The Confidence Men: how two prisoners of war engineered the most remarkable escape in history
• Blood and Ruins: the Great Imperial War, 1931-1945…
This is the first of a planned three-part history of the First World War organised by theatre. The second volume will deal with the Eastern Front (including Italy and the Balkans), the third with the wider war (mainly the Middle East and Africa). It is, first and foremost, a narrative…
When Stanley Christopherson wrote in his diary in late November 1945, he proclaimed, ‘So many outstanding things were done during this war, which so thoroughly deserved an award, but were never witnessed.’ The truism is appropriate. Recalling the battle conducted by his tank-crews of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, Christopherson had…
Kent is a county with a rich and unique archaeological record. Situated as it is, surrounded by sea to the north and east, cut off from London and Essex by rivers to the north-west, and divided from Surrey and Sussex by the hilly terrain of the Downland and High Weald…
Broken Seas, Broken Ships is Ian Friel’s latest book on the history of ships and shipwrecks in Britain, and is the ‘sequel’ to Britain and the Open Road (2020), which covered British maritime history starting in the medieval period and ending in the 1820s – and formed the basis of…
At over 500 pages, David Mason’s volume on Roman activity in County Durham is the first comprehensive analysis of Roman military and civilian activity for this part of north-east England; many of the sites have not previously been examined in any depth, making the book a welcome addition to our…
In 1938, the large triple-banked early medieval ringfort of Lisnacaragh at Garranes was excavated by Professor Brendan O’Riordain of University College Cork. He uncovered debris from fine metalworking and imported pottery on a scale that has yet to be repeated at any ringfort excavated in Ireland. At the time, the…
One of the more impressive aspects of this book – the outcome of a British Academy Conference held in 2015 – is the range of evidence that is marshalled to trace migrants in the medieval past. As might be expected, there is a very good summary of the genetic and…
Writing a book about the history of a Roman town in Britain is not an easy task. To create a readable and balanced account, an author has to contend with various levels of knowledge, inevitably glossing over or filling in the areas where it is weakest. There tends to be…
Disease has been a constant companion of humankind throughout the ages. As civilisations rose, populations flourished, and trade routes expanded, people brought their ideas, their goods, and their pathogens to new lands and cities that had never previously encountered them. The lack of natural immunity to the transported bacteria, viruses,…
This new book explores the purpose of decorative practices in Middle and Late Iron Age Britain, moving beyond traditional approaches to Early Celtic Art to consider what these decorative objects did. To investigate what pattern does, fundamentally means viewing it not as passive decoration nor as having abstract, symbolic meaning,…
In this stimulating addition to the burgeoning literature of Hadrian’s Wall, Matthew Symonds, editor of Current World Archaeology, brings fresh emphases to the study of this endlessly fascinating Roman monument in the north of Britain, and in doing so shows that continuing research on the frontier constantly alters the way…
After decades of slowly piecing together the puzzle of our human origins, the last ten years have seen a gigantic leap forward in our knowledge, spurred by advances in aDNA (see CA 338), radiocarbon dating, and other areas of archaeological science. This new book by Tom Higham draws all of…
Situated on the bank of the Thames near central London, Greenwich was once a hub of industrial activity, with bustling docks and hundreds of manufacturing, maritime, and riverside trades. The waterway itself is relatively quiet now, and while the area’s rich past is very much still evident – with its…