Book Reviews

A conundrum of history books is that some great research is written in an uninteresting fashion, and some beautifully written tomes are filled with errors in their research or lack citations entirely. The Crewe Murders is an exceptional book...

Keith Michael Baker’s Jean-Paul Marat: Prophet of Terror is a 27-chapter comprehensive biography of one of the men identified with the French Revolution’s most violent period. While mostly known today as the author of the radical pamphlet...

Amir Alexander begins Liberty’s Grid by considering the view of the San Fernando Valley from Castle Peak, a hill near his home. Although the Valley is peculiar in many respects, when viewed from the top of a 600-foot hill, it is easy to see...

In The Heretic of Cacheu, Toby Green uses one extraordinary life to illuminate a broader historical landscape shaped by commerce, belief, gender, and cultural negotiation. Cacheu, located in present-day Guinea-Bissau, was a small but vital...

John Haywood, who received a PhD in early medieval European history, is a veteran of creating historical atlases, and his latest book does not disappoint. The Making of the Middle Ages focuses on the period that has traditionally been described...

The Maya Myths: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes and Ancestors by Mallory E. Matsumoto is the eighth instalment of Thames and Hudson’s mythology guides series and has succeeded in packing a huge quantity of information into a relatively short...

Born in the year 894, Aethelstan was the third in a remarkable line of great warrior kings from Wessex. His grandfather, Alfred the Great, halted the Viking advance into southern England; his father, Edward the Elder, reconquered the Viking...

In 1066 and All That (1930), a parody book of English history, Cnut is described as a "bad king," who "became a good king." While this is a simplistic overview, it captures the essence of the portrait Ryan Lavelle paints in Cnut: The North...

With Tamta’s World: The Life and Encounters of a Medieval Noblewoman from the Middle East to Mongolia, Anthony Eastmond, currently the AG Leventis Professor of Byzantine Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, offers us a vivid account of...

Racism is often considered a question of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The accused racist will sometimes deploy the tired old defense that he or she "has black friends," a defense that only makes sense if racism is exclusively defined...