REVIEW BY CH Dogs may be ‘man’s best friend’, but cats also share a long relationship with humans – a tale (tail?) that archaeologist Jerry Moore recounts in this absorbing overview, covering two million years of history and an equally…
REVIEW BY REBECCA GOWLAND The town of Blackburn in Lancashire was a key player in Britain’s industrial cotton boom, which saw a quadrupling of its inhabitants during the first half of the 19th century. This volume presents the results of…
REVIEW BY FINBAR McCORMICK This book is the first interdisciplinary analysis of early Irish kingship based on both historical and archaeological sources; it was formerly the preserve of just historians. This new approach is a fresh contribution to our understanding…
REVIEW BY ROB IXER This is the second landscape book by Jackson to be published this year and is in many respects a prequel to his earlier Rocks on the Edge of Empire, which is itself a splendid, sometimes stunning,…
REVIEW BY MATTHEW SYMONDS This volume honours Professor David Kennedy, a pioneering scholar of ancient Arabia and Rome’s eastern frontier, by bringing together 21 scholarly contributions examining both the archaeology of the wider region, and the way that it is…
REVIEW BY OSCAR MORO ABADIA This publication was created to accompany the British Museum Partnership Exhibition Ice Age art now, held at Cliffe Castle Museum in summer 2025. The exhibition showcased the British Museum’s remarkable collection of Pleistocene mobiliary art…
REVIEW BY TIMOTHY MATNEY The academic world inhabited by Sumerologists and Assyriologists is highly specialised and largely inaccessible for even the hardiest lovers of history. The texts themselves are fragmentary, often pieced together from disparate copies, deliberately anachronistic, and range…
REVIEW BY NICK HEWITT Developing a fresh interpretation for a well-charted subject area is always a challenge, as this reviewer knows only too well. I therefore approached Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s reconsideration of the naval campaign fought to sustain the Soviet Union…
REVIEW BY JONATHAN EATON Despite the vast literature on the First World War, there remain important aspects of the conflict that have yet to be fully explored. In recent years, a series of valuable treatises have expanded our understanding of…
REVIEW BY ANDRÉ VAN LOON To get straight to the point: the strength of Soviet Secret Police Chiefs lies in its weakness. It is an engrossing read and yet a partial historical account, which leaves the deepest questions about the…
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD Growing up near RAF Scampton at the height of the Cold War, in my formative years the delta-winged Avro Vulcan was a familiar sight. Soaring overhead with what V-Force author Jonathan Glancey calls its ‘otherworldly howl’,…
REVIEW BY ROB IXER This is a peculiar hybrid of a book. It is a pretty good generalised account of British ‘historical geology’, namely a description of the occurrence of all the rocks given in stratigraphical order from the earliest…
REVIEW BY KEITH RAY Neolithic Tombs of Wales is a revised edition of a book with similar scope that was published 20 years ago by the same publisher. It is fundamentally a field guide to around 100 sites whose remains…
REVIEW BY KK The title of this book explains it all. Reading it is like stepping into a dimly lit, 19th-century hall of curiosities, with various unusual artefacts covering every available surface. By giving a tour through this bizarre exhibition,…
REVIEW BY MIRANDA ALDHOUSE-GREEN This monograph examines the important, yet underestimated subject of the magical objects that form part of the archaeological footprint left by Roman Britons. It focuses on – so often neglected – small objects that form a…
REVIEW BY TOBY DRIVER From the outset, the authors of this impressive research report remind us of the importance both of Caerleon Roman fortress and of the excavations and evaluations carried out in the Priory Field between 2007 and 2010.…
Review KK This debut novel by Tony Robinson, of Time Team and Blackadder fame, takes us on a tour of 9th-century Europe: from the Holy Roman Emperor’s royal residence at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) in Francia, to the home of the Pope…
REVIEW BY ANDREW FULTON This volume is part of a series of books of ancient texts that Amber Books are publishing in hardback using traditional Chinese bookbinding methods that were first developed in the Ming Dynasty. The results are impressive…
REVIEW BY HILARY FORREST This thoroughly researched book contains a wealth of material, and covers the frequently discussed question of how Egyptological displays should be planned and designed, both culturally and ethically. The main focus is on the place of…
REVIEW BY MICHAEL TUNNICLIFFE This important work claims to be the first authoritative edition to combine both transliteration and translation of the Amarna Letters since their publication by Norwegian linguist J A Knudtzon in 1915. The 1992 volume by W…
REVIEW BY ROGER FORSHAW Michelle Middleman’s new book presents a well-structured and perceptive exploration of how individuals attained administrative positions during Egypt’s early dynastic era. Focusing primarily on tomb biographies from the Sixth Dynasty, Middleman uses these inscriptions as a…
REVIEW BY HILARY WILSON Any author might be daunted by the ambitious subtitle of the ‘Brief Histories’ format, but Campbell Price has risen to the challenge. In little more than 100 smaller-than-A5 text pages, with only three randomly placed photographic…
REVIEW BY KK Encapsulated within this volume are the published proceedings of the conference held in 2020 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (SHARP) – but it is so much more than a…
REVIEW BY NEIL HOLBROOK It is always instructive to look at the areas surrounding famous archaeological sites, as they can provide valuable context for the well-known remains. So it is with Silchester in Hampshire, where a late Iron Age oppidum…
REVIEW BY ALEXANDRA SANMARK This book is a welcome addition to our knowledge about Viking Age and Norse colonisation and settlement in the Hebrides, and provides the first overview of this time period in western Scotland. The book is structured…
REVIEW BY ADAM KLUPS Luke Sherlock’s Forgotten Churches is a visually rich and thoughtfully curated tribute to England’s sacred spaces. As a long-time follower of Sherlock’s Instagram account @englishpilgrim, I was intrigued to discover the familiar aesthetic now transformed into…
REVIEW BY CARLY AMEEN This fifth volume in the ‘Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World’ series exemplifies contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship. The editors, Maren Clegg Hyer and Gale R Owen-Crocker, have assembled contributions that seamlessly weave evidence from archaeology, history, art…
REVIEW BY CH For this collection of 34 poems imagining western England’s prehistoric and Roman pasts, Slow Migrations is a fitting title. Many of the works within – inspired by the Corinium Museum in Cirencester and the Roman Baths at…
REVIEW BY OLIVER CREIGHTON This new, ambitious, elegantly produced volume showcases how archaeology is transforming our understanding of horses in the human past. Its purpose is twofold: to provide an introduction for those, particularly students, who have a general interest…
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH Across Europe, during the Late Bronze Age, societies witnessed a dramatic change in economy, politics, and social behaviour. This change also had an effect on the way communities expressed themselves through burial-ritual practices and the production and…
REVIEW BY EMMA LOUISE THOMPSON From Norwegian courts to Icelandic households and British burial grounds, the lives of Viking women were as intricate as the worlds they inhabited. The Hidden Lives of Viking Women offers a ‘kaleidoscopic review’ drawing on…
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD The Supermarine Spitfire has received more attention in print than almost any other aircraft in history, but relatively little has been written about the life of its designer, R J Mitchell. His son, the late Gordon…
REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON When Tim Bouverie’s first book Appeasing Hitler appeared in 2019, it was generally considered to be something of a stunning debut: an eloquent and well-researched history of one of the most written-about periods in British history…
REVIEW BY NICK HEWITT Historian and broadcaster Tessa Dunlop has energetically breathed life into the ‘history in a hundred’ format with her enthralling new book, which should be essential reading not just for those with an interest in war and…
REVIEW BY DAVID PORTER In January 1945, the Red Army launched a powerful operation that was intended to go all the way to Berlin. The Vistula–Oder Offensive, as it was known, is the subject of this new book by Prit…
MHM’s round-up of the latest military history releases.