The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Ian Gentles, The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution is an updated edition of your earlier title, but it’s almost a different book – just how much has changed? The first edition has been condensed to about half its original length. It assimilates much new research,...
John Rastell: Renaissance Man and Bookseller Around the year 1500 Wynkyn de Worde moved his printing press from the precinct of Westminster Abbey to premises in Fleet Street. De Worde was the Dutch assistant of William Caxton, who had introduced printing to England,...
The New Model Army takes on board a great deal of new research – by Phil Baker, Rachel Foxley and John Rees among others -- on the Leveller movement, with whom the New Model was in close contact throughout its fifteen-year history. When in the 1650s the soldiers...
Charles Cornwallis, Lord Cornwallis, is remembered as one of the salient military leaders of the American Revolution, blamed for the British defeat at Yorktown that marked the beginning of the end of the Revolution. Yet as Richard Middleton´s masterful new biography...
Richard Middleton, Charles, 1st Marquis Cornwallis is probably most well-known for his disastrous military leadership during the American War of Independence. Was he really a terrible commander? Cornwallis’s career as a field commander certainly began badly when he...
As the light began to fade on 2 January 1777, a group of red-coated figures gathered in discussion on a small hill overlooking the village of Trenton, New Jersey. The urgency of their deliberations was emphasised by the rumbling sound of nearby musketry and cannon...
Penelope Corfield clearly has a knowledge of - and love for - her subject. The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th Century Britain provides a comprehensive overview of the period, whilst garnishing the account with plenty of insight and detail. What is...
Vladislav Zubok, Collapse is a brilliant book and incredibly comprehensive, but there are polar opposite narratives about this historical period which focus (for example) on the nefarious actions of the KGB in Eastern Europe. Did you deliberately avoid exploring the...
As a long-term Russophile with a grudge against the Bolsheviks I jumped at the chance to review this authoritative book, written through the unclouded lens of such an illustrious Russian historian. Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union is enthralling from the get-go,...
Gorbachev and the Chernobyl Disaster Whatever calculations Mikhail Gorbachev, his Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and Soviet economists had made for the long term, the catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant wrecked everything. The explosion of one of its four...
