In View
MHM’s round-up of the latest military history titles.
Books
The Panzers of Prokhorovka: The myth of Hitler’s greatest armoured defeat
REVIEW BY TOBY CLARK This new book by Dr Ben Wheatley of the University of East Anglia can claim success in the fields of both academic and popular history. With a nod to the Soviet ideal of ‘deep battle’, Wheatley…
Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt: An eyewitness history
REVIEW BY PATRICK MERCER When I joined the army there were sphinxes all over the place: on cap badges, collar badges, sporran badges, embroidered on Regimental Colours… The Gloucesters even wore two, one fore and another aft, to commemorate fighting…
Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age
REVIEW BY MARC DESANTIS Over several centuries, Rome met and bested every other organised state of the Mediterranean basin. By overcoming all rivals, Rome extinguished the ability of other states to make war, which was now its monopoly. It was…
Women in Intelligence: The hidden history of two World Wars
REVIEW BY CALUM HENDERSON Mata Hari was the ultimate femme fatale. The Dutch-born exotic dancer and courtesan was famously beautiful and enigmatic, and equally notorious for her many affairs – often with military officers. But Mata Hari led a double…
The Savage Storm: The battle for Italy 1943
REVIEW BY JONATHAN EATON James Holland has established a firm reputation as one of the leading British historians of the Second World War. He has published a series of books that have transformed our understanding of the conflict, most recently…
Exploring Norfolk’s Deep History Coast
REVIEW BY NATALIE BUTLER John Davies and David Waterhouse take the reader on an absorbing journey into Norfolk’s past. Exploring Norfolk’s Deep History Coast is carefully researched and beautifully presented. It offers a whole and knowledgeable guide to the rich…
Millstones of the Pennines and North West England
REVIEW BY CERI PENNINGTON This engaging read explores the archaeology, geology, and history of millstones in North-West England and the Pennines. Initially focusing on the background of the study, the volume then moves into examining case studies of specific sites,…
Repeopling La Manche: new perspectives on Neanderthal archaeology and landscapes from La Cotte de St Brelade
REVIEW BY FRANCIS WENBAN-SMITH This volume presents an interim report on the current research into Middle Palaeolithic Neanderthal occupation on Jersey and in its vicinity, centred on re-investigation of La Cotte de St Brelade rock-shelter and its distinctive mammoth bone…
The Road: a story of Romans and ways to the past
REVIEW BY ANDREW TIBBS The Road is a personal journey by the author to experience Roman roads and how they impacted the lives of those around them, and the surrounding landscape, not just 2,000 years ago, but in more recent…
Wild History: Journeys into Lost Scotland
REVIEW BY HUGH CHEAPE James Crawford, broadcaster and writer, has won plaudits for the cultural biographies in his Fallen Glory: the lives and deaths of history’s greatest buildings, and its tales of ‘hubris, power, violence and decay’. Now, he has…
Footmarks: a journey into our restless past
REVIEW BY RICHARD BRUNNING Footmarks is a long and pleasant walk through the mind palace of prehistorian Jim Leary. Along the way, Leary’s delight in the mysteries of past human behaviour gushes forth in an engaging torrent of information, loosely…
The world’s oldest book?
Routine work on fragments of a Ptolemaic Period papyrus at the University of Graz Library in Austria has revealed traces of stitching, suggesting the text was once part of a book, rather than a scroll. Found at el-Hiba necropolis in…
Nubia: Lost Civilizations
REVIEW BY ANNA GARNETT Studies of the ancient Nile Valley have traditionally focused on Egypt as the predominant political and cultural power in the region, with relatively limited work in the Upper Nile region (until the construction of the Aswan…
Women in Ancient Egypt: Revisiting Power, Agency, and Autonomy
REVIEW BY HILARY WILSON This collection of papers from a 2019 Cairo conference represents current research into the life of women in ancient Egypt. By applying contemporary social values and gender assumptions, late 19th- and early 20th-century scholarship tended to…
A History of Ancient Egypt – Volume 3 : From the Shepherd Kings to the End of the Theban Monarchy
REVIEW BY CAMPBELL PRICE Many readers may remember the documentaries made for British television on Egyptian subjects by John Romer in the 1980s and 1990s. I vividly recall his impassioned delivery, which struck my schoolboy imagination as something different from…
The Treasure of the Egyptian Queen Ahhotep and International Relations at the Turn of the Middle Bronze Age (1600-1500 BCE)
REVIEW BY TANEASH SIDPURA The objects from Ahhotep’s burial at Dra Abu el-Naga, dating to the Eighteenth Dynasty, are a fascinating assemblage of mostly gold and other expensive materials, and are certainly worthy of further study. However, rather than being…
The Ptolemies: Rise of a Dynasty – Ptolemaic Egypt in 330-246 BC
REVIEW BY SG This is the first of three planned books on the last of Egypt’s dynasties, written not by an Egyptologist, but by a specialist in Classical and Hellenistic Greek history. This initial volume, covering the reigns of the…
A Gift of Geology: Ancient Egyptian Landscapes and Monuments
REVIEW BY JPP Colin Reader is a geologist who has combined his professional knowledge with his passion for Egyptology to produce a fascinating geological history of the country. The title of his book derives from Herodotus’ assertion that the ancient…
Stonehenge: a brief history
REVIEW BY ROB IXER After a slight temporal dip, we are back riding up on to a crest of the sine curve called ‘popular Stonehenge book publication’ (sadly, for a sun-orientated temple, this appears out of phase with the solar…
Villas, Sanctuaries, and Settlement in the Romano-British Countryside
REVIEW BY NEIL HOLBROOK Did all the buildings in the Roman countryside that we call ‘villas’ perform the same function? Were they mostly nicely appointed homes of people who had done well at farming, or country residences of the well-to-do…
The Eagle and the Bear: a new history of Roman Scotland
REVIEW BY MATTHEW SYMONDS Roman Scotland has long been a battleground. The remarkable remains of military works testify to the manpower that Rome committed to northern Britain, while the ancient literature reports fighting of varying intensity. An absence of any…
The Drowning of a Cornish Prehistoric Landscape: Tradition, deposition, and social responses to sea level rise
REVIEW BY JACQUELINE A NOWAKOWSKI Mount’s Bay, west Cornwall, hosts a major drowned landscape. This attractive and well-produced monograph successfully integrates results of the excavation of a Bronze Age enclosure barrow, east of Penzance in the littoral zone, with excellent…
Roman Frontier Archaeology in Britain and Beyond: Papers in honour of Paul Bidwell presented on the occasion of the 30th annual conference of the Arbeia Society
REVIEW BY ANDREW TIBBS The study of Roman frontiers goes from strength to strength, as demonstrated in this volume, which marked the 30th annual conference of the Arbeia Society, the organisation that manages the Roman fort and recreated buildings at…
Burton Dassett, Southend, Warwickshire: a medieval market village
REVIEW BY JOHN HUNT Burton Dassett, in the Warwickshire Feldon, has previously attracted attention as representing rural settlements in the area that suffered depopulation in the late medieval period. This long-awaited publication of the excavations undertaken at Southend between 1986…
The World of the Ancient Silk Road
REVIEW BY TIM WILLIAMS This book is a collection of papers that focus on themes of human migration, communication, and cross-cultural exchange along the Silk Roads, from the 3rd millennium BC to the early 2nd millennium AD. The volume is…
Europe’s Lost Frontiers – Volume 1 : Context and Methodology
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH Due to current climate change, the coastline of north-western Europe is in a state of flux, resulting in the slow but inevitable inundation of the sea. This change in coastline is clearly witnessed by the ongoing disappearance…
The Museum of the Wood Age
REVIEW BY ROLAND ENNOS Given the preponderance of stone, bronze, and iron artefacts found at archaeological sites, and their usefulness in enabling archaeologists to date their finds, it has perhaps been inevitable that so much research has concentrated on these…
MHM 135 Competition and Crossword
This issue, we’re giving away three signed copies of The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: the hidden truth at the centre of WWII’s greatest battle by Iain MacGregor The foundation of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II…
In View
MHM’s round-up of the latest military history titles
SAS Great Escapes Two: Six untold epic escapes made by World War Two heroes
REVIEW BY DAVID FLINTHAM Sequels can often be disappointing: they put additional pressure on the author to come up with something as good as the original, and create a sense of expectation among the readership which can be hard to…
Dam Buster – Barnes Wallis: an engineer’s life
REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD The 80th anniversary of the Dambusters raid in May received a certain amount of media attention and several new books on the event will have appeared by the end of this year. Yet Barnes Wallis, whose…
Revolutionary Spring: fighting for a new world 1848-1849
REVIEW BY JONATHAN EATON As Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, Sir Christopher Clark has an established reputation for the crafting of insightful historical narratives that explore complex periods of change and turbulence across the European continent.…
Footsloggers: an infantry battalion at war 1939-45
REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND Britain’s ‘poor bloody infantry’ did most of her fighting and dying during World War II. For all the glamour of the SAS or the prestige of the Grenadier Guards, it was the humble county regiments who…
Bismarck’s War: the Franco-Prussian war and the making of modern Europe
REVIEW BY DAVID PORTER Although the often-forgotten Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 was launched by the French Empire of Napoleon III, the truly central figure in the conflict – as the title of this new book by historian Rachel Chrastil suggests…
The First Stones: Penywyrlod, Gwernvale, and the Black Mountains Neolithic long cairns of south-east Wales
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH The two Cotswold-Severn Neolithic burial-ritual monuments of Penywyrlod and Gwernvale occupy the western hinterlands of the Black Mountains in Breconshire, Wales. Both monuments are only part of a handful of Neolithic burial-ritual monuments in Wales to…