Book Reviews

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...

Ordinarily, when one considers a book about ancient Egypt, one might think about discussions surrounding the culture, language, religion, and surviving architecture. Not so, in this case. Empress of the Nile: The Daredevil Archaeologist Who...

It is, I imagine, quite difficult to write a compelling work of historical fiction. Not only do you have to have mastered the traditional components of good storytelling - plot, character, dialogue, etc. - but you also have to become intimately...

Centered on the period of the American Civil War, Relics of War: The History of a Photograph is unique in that, rather than focusing merely on the political facets of the War, it examines the impact it had on the lives of the common people...

“There was in Mercia in fairly recent times a certain vigorous king called Offa, who terrified all the neighbouring kings and provinces around him,” said Bishop Asser, a Welsh monk, in the 9th century, describing the peak of the “Mercian...

General readers would find this elegantly written work stimulating, while college and university faculty would welcome this as a much-needed textbook for their Indian history or world civilization courses. Audrey Truschke traverses a vast...

Democracy and security have never gotten along in American society; even as nearly everyone agrees that some information should be kept from the public, just as many agree that secrecy opens the door to corruption, tyranny, and conspiracy...

In the year 1014, Archbishop Wulfstan of York stood before his parishioners and delivered a damming lecture: “Nothing has prospered now for a long time either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning...

When Alfred the Great – often presented as England’s founding father – died in 899, much of England was still under Viking rule. His kingdom was restricted to the southern realms of Wessex (south of the Thames) and western Mercia (West Midlands...