PAST PRESENT – What’s new in History

Some books of history have been so ground breaking and influential that they demand a place in your library even if they are decades old themselves and the period has been covered more recently. Peter Brown’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brown_(historian)) The World of Late Antiquity, published in 1971, is one such.   The period in question (AD 150-750) had […]

If faced with surgery most of us expect to go under the knife painlessly and wake up sorted. For almost the whole of human history that would have been impossible.  Agony, a botched job or death were next to certain. How then did we get from butchery to modern surgery in the last 200 years?

Not many history books offer the brilliant blend of accurate record and compelling narrative as does The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. The reader is entertainingly informed about a raft of fascinating detail – the execution of Mary, the attack on Cadiz (the famous “singeing of the beard”), the capture of Sluys, the battle of

The Spanish tourist industry hopes Britons do not abandon their traditional summer holiday after Brexit. The Spanish economy is hugely dependent on Northern European visitors, especially the British. 2017 may see up to 15 million Brits (https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/aug/30/record-numbers-britons-travel-spain-summer-holidays-tourism) (3 times the entire population of Scotland) get their annual dose of sun there. It may be that

Not many human civilisations, or their seats of power, last thousands of years. Byzantium is one of them. This major place of power and cultural influence has had three instantiations: Byzantium, Constantinople, and Istanbul. In this book, historian Bettany Hughes (https://www.bettanyhughes.co.uk/) describes the bitter clashes of civilisation that have occurred where Europe meets Asia —

In this book Denis Feeney (http://www.princeton.edu/classics/people/display_person.xml?netid=dfeeney) argues that the creation of a Roman literature on Greek models was not just a matter of time, something that was bound to happen sooner or later, but instead one of the strangest and most unlikely events of Mediterranean history. Authors whom we read every day – Virgil, Ovid, Cicero

Chris Wickham challenges the idea, inherited from Edward Gibbon, that Rome went into a ‘decline and fall’. The late Roman world was, as he shows, a stable and sophisticated society, bound together by patronage, commerce and, above all, taxation. Many of its citizens lived in bustling cities or country estates. It did not suddenly fall

From the year 1000 remarkable changes can be charted in Europe. The lifting of the Dark Ages brought with it a huge gain in population (from two million to ten million in England, from four to fourteen million in German-speaking countries, and so on). There were advances in technology, including the adoption of three-field farming

Empires come and go. The relative strength of cultures around the globe wax and wane. Europe, arguably, has enjoyed a 500 year dominance. But how did its culture rise to achieve imperial influence? Tim Blanning (https://www.sid.cam.ac.uk/aboutus/people/person.html?crsid=tcb1000) offers some answers by giving an account of ‘the long 18th century’ (1648-1815). He begins with The Treaty of

Famously depicted as ‘Crookback Dick’, and as Shakespeare’s ‘bunch-back’d toad’, the murderer of the Princes in the Tower and the warrior vanquished at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III is one of England’s most enigmatic monarchs. Now, with the discovery of Richard’s bones under a car park in Leicester in 2012 and their reburial

This book takes the highly contentious position among historians that the Holy Roman Empire (http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/modern-europe/german-history/holy-roman-empire) was a stable and successful political structure. It is presented as a thematic history of the Empire from its medieval origins to its demise in 1806.   In the first of four sections, ‘Ideal’, Peter Wilson shows the power of the imperial ambition:

The SAS was the brainchild of David Stirling, a languid young Scottish aristocrat. With difficulty he persuaded General Claude Auchinleck, the 8th Army commander in WW 2, to approve a mobile force operating behind enemy lines. The plan was to disrupt communications and infiltrate aerodromes to destroy planes on the ground. He gathered a motley