Culture

Crucible of Hell: Okinawa: the last great battle of the Second World War

In this year of reflection on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, too often our Western gaze falls solely on events in Europe. We rightly mourn those who died in the final, catastrophic battles in Nazi Germany and celebrate the final end of war in Europe on VE Day. But when the guns fell silent in Europe, the desperate fight between the Allies and the Japanese raged on. In Crucible of Hell, Saul David takes the reader on a journey to Okinawa, ‘the last great battle of the Second World War’.

Old Oswestry Hillfort and its Landscape: ancient past, uncertain future

Sharing elements with a standard regional study of a hillfort in geographical context, this series of papers is distinctly wider in scope. It is neither underpinned by recent excavation, nor by reassessment in detail of the 1930s interventions. Instead, ten…

The Isle of Man: Stone Age to Swinging Sixties

Within its 225 square miles, the Isle of Man boasts an impressively diverse historic landscape spanning some 10,000 years of human activity. In this compact but wide-ranging book, our guide is Matthew Richardson, curator of social history at Manx National…

Great Cloister: a lost Canterbury Tale

Among the 856 heraldic shields emblazoned on the ceilings of the cloister of Canterbury Cathedral is hidden a story of the social and political history of 14th- and 15th-century England. In this large and intensively researched volume, Paul A Fox…

The Life Biography of Artefacts and Ritual Practice: with case studies from Mesolithic-Early Bronze Age Europe

Within the context of burial and ritual, archaeologists have found it near-impossible to understand why mundane objects became the focus for ritual deposition. I suppose it is all too easy to look at anthropology and ethnography to get some of…

The Chadwell St Mary Ringwork: a late Bronze Age and Anglo-Saxon settlement in southern Essex

This volume in the British Archaeological Reports series presents the results of excavations by Archaeological Solutions Ltd in advance of gravel-quarrying on a hilltop next to the Thames Estuary in Essex, just to the south-west of the Mucking ridge, where…

1520: the Field of the Cloth of Gold

Published 500 years after the event took place, this book serves as a quincentenary celebration of the legendary first meeting between Henry VIII, the English king (r. 1509-1547), and Francis I, the French king (r. 1515-1547). Known as the Field…