PAST PRESENT – Readings in History

First published in 1939 this classic study of the end of the Roman Republic still contains a wealth of scholarship for contemporary readers. The central thesis is that a political revolution occurred which transformed the Roman city state into a Imperial power, capable of fully developing its Empire and utilising the resources of the subjugated […]

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