Popular history book reviews

New history books in March 2026

2026-04-02T00:00:00Z

A veritable cornucopia¹ of new history books out last month, with no fewer than 18 new titles identified from my exhaustive scraping of the internet. Here are a few that I have my eye on with two of them actually on my shelf already:

How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons, by Nicholas J. Higham. I know the dark ages are not supposed to be dark, but surely this bit of the dark ages is genuinely shadowy. It is a gap in my knowledge anyway.
Seven Sisters: Captives and Rebels in Revolutionary Europe's First Family, by Veronica Buckley. "Let others wage war: thou, happy Austria, marry" (Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube). While it was a happy policy for the Hapsburgs it didn't always work out too well for the ladies entering into those marriages...
The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History, by Odd Arne Westad. I am already half-way through this short and urgent book, which looks at the parallels between today's world and the world immediately before 1914 and the First World War. There are enough similarities for the author to sound the alarm.

Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.

The full list:

📕 A History of France in 21 Women
📘 A Kingdom and a Village: A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow
📔 A Woman's Work: A History of Motherhood
📗 Echoes of Ash: Life in Herculaneum
📙 Europe: A New History
📓 How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons
📒 Nuclear Weapons: An International History
📙 Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs
📘 Seven Sisters: Captives and Rebels in Revolutionary Europe's First Family
📔 Sir Walter Raleigh: A New History
📗 The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure
📕 The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History
📘 The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain
📔 The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews
📗 The Idea of China: A Contested History
📙 The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History
📔 The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World
📘 Venice and the Mongols: The Eurasian Exchange That Transformed the Medieval World

I'm not sure why but most cornucopias seem to be veritable ↩︎

Oliver Cromwell - review

2026-03-29T00:00:00Z

Our review of Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief, by Ronald Hutton, first published in August 2024.

The first two parts of Ronald Hutton’s planned three-part biography of Oliver Cromwell provide a vivid portrait of one of the most significant figures in British history.

★★★★☆

There is general agreement, first, that Cromwell is one of the great figures of British history, and yet also, second, that the nature of that greatness is shrouded in paradox

Ronald Hutton, quoting historian James Colin Davis

The historian Ronald Hutton, professor at the University of Bristol, has published the first two books in his planned three-book series on the life of Oliver Cromwell, which forms part of the Yale English Monarchs Series.

The first book, published in 2021, covers Cromwell’s life from birth in 1599 to 1647, following the end of the First English Civil War in 1646. This book includes Cromwell’s early life (for which there are few surviving records), his early political career (he became a Member of Parliament in 1628) and his formative years soldiering in the First English Civil War, rising from a cavalry captain to Lieutenant-General of Horse under Sir Thomas Fairfax. This book is battle heavy. During this period Cromwell was first and foremost a soldier, and that is how he established his reputation.

The second book was published in 2024 and picks up the story in 1647 with Oliver Cromwell and his family newly established in London and Cromwell resuming his career as a Member of Parliament. He is soon called back to military service for the short Second Civil War (1648) and campaigns in Ireland (1649-1650) and then Scotland (1650-1651).¹ It concludes in 1653, with Cromwell forcibly dissolving Parliament, at which point he has effectively established a military dictatorship over the whole of the British Isles. This book is more of a mixture of politics and warfare than the first. It only covers six years, but those are arguably the most significant and famous six years of Cromwell’s life. For the reasons set out below, I thought this was the stronger of the two books.

A reasonable question may be why I am reviewing two books in a three-book series. I have no particularly good answer, except that: (i) the third book is yet to be published; and (ii) I have just read these two books with the intention of reviewing them, mistakenly believing them to be part of a two-book, not three-book, series. Consider this a preliminary perspective on what will no doubt prove to be the author’s magnum opus.²

Historiography

Given that Cromwell is one of the most written-about people in British history, does Professor Hutton have anything new to say about him? The distinguishing characteristics of these books are a scepticism about taking Cromwell at his own word, and an insistence on perceiving Cromwell in the context of his own times, rather than as a reflection of contemporary politics. The central argument is that Oliver Cromwell was ‘more pragmatic and more devious than the one represented by his own speeches and writings’.

The historiography of Cromwell is a fascinating subject in its own right. For eighteenth and nineteenth century Whigs, Cromwell was a progressive hero. But whilst Cromwell’s impact may have inadvertently resulted in outcomes that we view today as positive (parliamentary democracy, religious tolerance and pluralism) they were hardly ever his objectives.

A bad man?

Devious, ruthless, manipulative and self-seeking

Ronald Hutton, describing Oliver Cromwell

Over the combined 727 pages of the two books, I was left with the impression that Ronald Hutton does not like Oliver Cromwell. Does that make his biography unreliable or unbalanced? I don’t think so, or perhaps only subtly or marginally. He clearly knows his subject matter inside out and is utterly meticulous and scrupulously fair in laying out all available evidence, particularly for the most contentious topics, such as the Siege of Drogheda.

Having said that, there are times when the author strains to interpret actions and events in the worst possible light for Cromwell. When Cromwell reforms the legal system in Ireland to provide more opportunities for Catholic tenants to seek redress from landlords, we are told that this was to ‘win their gratitude and make them more inclined to convert to Protestantism’, which struck me as a bit of a ‘damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t’ situation.

Cromwell’s remarkably successful military career is repeatedly ascribed to luck, whilst praise is begrudging – he is described ‘a competent trickster’ and we are told of his ‘methodical efficiency’. One of the most striking facts about Cromwell is that he first became a soldier at the age of 43, having had no previous professional military experience, and then went on to become one of the most successful soldiers in British history. The book could have done more to explain that success, apart from recourse to luck alone.

Whatever Cromwell’s many faults, he is a role model for a mid-life career change.

Cromwell’s publicity machine

The problem any biographer of Cromwell faces is the frequent lack of evidence, which Hutton himself admits on a number of occasions. That vacuum then provides the space for interpretations of the few sources there are in a more or less flattering way for Cromwell.

For example, there are repeated references in these books to the way in which the London press would exaggerate the role of Cromwell in military successes, whilst downplaying the role of others. But there is little (in fact, as far as I could tell, no) evidence linking Cromwell to any specific person in the London press – so instead we have vague references to ‘Oliver’s allies in the London press’ and his ‘publicity machine – whoever was running it’.

Elsewhere the author admits that ‘at no point is it clear how directly Oliver himself was involved in representations of himself in the press, and how much they were controlled by friends and well-wishers. What can be said is that the admiring portraits of his actions that were published would not have appeared so consistently had he not condoned or encouraged them’. ‘Condoning’ (or even ‘encouraging’) a positive portrayal hardly seems the most damning accusation to ever have been made against a politician.

The Elect

A natural holy warrior, a Puritan jihadi

Ronald Hutton, describing Oliver Cromwell

The author convincingly argues that it is misleading to see Cromwell through the prism of contemporary values.³ Past historians have made the mistake of casting Cromwell as a sort of proto-liberal, arguing for religious pluralism and tolerance. But the tolerance he advocated only applied to the type of Puritanism he favoured. He was never in favour of allowing tolerance to Roman Catholics or, for that matter, traditional Anglicans. He argued for the right of ‘independents’ to worship outside the official Church, but that was probably a pragmatic solution to the fact that most of the political elite and the country at large had little appetite for the type of religion he favoured. It is perfectly conceivable that if he could have found a way of making his brand Puritanism the ‘official’ version, his views on tolerance of religious minorities would have adjusted accordingly.⁴

Seen in this way, his career, and that of the army with which he was always closely associated, can appear as a successive process of narrowing down the ruling class to those who shared their own outlook.

First, he fought alongside Parliament to defeat the Royalists and therefore traditional Anglicanism.
Then, with Pride’s Purge in December 1648, the New Model Army prevented most of Parliament’s Presbyterians from taking their seats (leaving the so-called Rump Parliament).
Finally, on 20 April 1653, Cromwell and 40 musketeers forcibly dissolved a Parliament unwilling to bend to the wishes of the army independents.

At no point is there any indication that Cromwell questioned the legitimacy of what he was doing. In fact, one of the principal factors which may have led to Cromwell’s decision to forcibly dissolve Parliament in 1653 may have been a discussion he had with Parliamentary leaders at his home the preceding evening: in those discussions, Cromwell and fellow army independents asked how they could have assurances that new elections would only return the ‘right sort’ of persons (by which they meant those who agreed with them).

It may have been the failure of Parliamentary leaders to provide a convincing response to that question (realistically, how could a mechanism be devised which would exclude all Anglicans and Presbyterians from office?) that prompted Cromwell to take decisive action the following morning. In private letters, Cromwell was explicit in his belief that a ‘godly minority’ had the right to exclude from power an ‘ungodly majority’. Cromwell viewed the world ‘as divided into the followers and enemies of God’. It’s an object lesson on the dangers of the politically and morally self-righteous.

A pre-Enlightenment revolution

This book made me think about how Cromwell compares to later revolutionaries. Perhaps some historians have tried to interpret England’s overthrow of its King⁵ in the seventeenth century as a dry run for the later eighteenth century American and French revolutions. But what becomes clear from this book is that Oliver Cromwell was a product of a pre-Enlightenment Europe. Whilst Jefferson and Lafayette were inspired by Enlightenment ideas about human rights and freedom, Cromwell was more interested in his God and doing what he thought his God wanted him to do.⁶ To what extent other protagonists in the English Civil Wars were motivated by nascent ideas about human freedom and liberty is an interesting question.⁷

Summary of charges and defences

A poor weak creature, and not worthy of the name of a worm, yet accepted to serve the Lord and his people

Cromwell describing himself, in a letter to a fellow Puritan in Massachusetts

In the interests of fairness, I will attempt to summarise possible charges against Cromwell’s character and how I assess the weight of evidence for each:

Was Cromwell bloodthirsty and excessively harsh to opponents by the standards of his time? We are told that Cromwell 'had a savage streak in his nature which enjoyed inflicting death, injury or humiliation of those against whom he had taken'. Elsewhere we are told that Cromwell 'had always been a killer' and that his cavalry had 'long taken pleasure in killing'. Instinctively, I expect this may be right - but these claims are a bit speculative based on the sources available. Another interpretation is that he was just good at his job of being a soldier, which after all did involve killing people, and that tended to irritate people he was up against. There is a lack of substantial proof of him breaching the conventions of warfare which prevailed at the time. On the other hand, it can be shown that Cromwell was willing to treat enemies leniently when it was prudent (or expected) to do so. He was also strict about military discipline when it came to matters involving the interaction of his soldiers with civilians – he was willing to hang his own soldiers for pillaging locals. I had a feeling that if I was a neutral civilian, I would not necessarily want to encounter Cromwell and his soldiers, but that there may have been worse alternatives.
These books present an image of Cromwell as good at self-publicity and politically manipulative. As mentioned above, I am not convinced that Cromwell had an organised 'publicity machine' in London, but there are plenty of examples of his tendency to exaggerate his own role in military successes whilst downplaying the role of others. There are also occasions when he can be shown to have lied to or misled Parliament. Cromwell's way of speaking has a slightly annoying quality of feigned⁸ simplicity and piety (whilst obscuring points of contention) which smacks of hypocrisy to a modern audience.
Was Cromwell politically and religiously self-righteous with an inherent belief in his right to exclude from power those he disagreed with? Yes, I think after reading these two books I am thoroughly convinced that this was the case. Given that his entire belief system was based on the view that he belonged to a tiny predestined religious elect, perhaps it is not surprising that he was not a natural democrat.

What did I think of the books?

These books are good at describing and explaining the logistics of seventeenth century warfare and doing so in a way that is not tedious. As I mentioned earlier, one of the notable features of Cromwell’s life is his recurring success in battle. A significant contributing factor to that was that he was consistently supported by a Parliament with the means and willingness to supply him with the things he and his army needed to successfully prosecute his campaigns. The level of granular detail given also brings to life the day-to-day life of the soldiers fighting with Cromwell effectively. At times, their lack of food inspired me to take a quick break for a snack, lest I also suffer from the effects of malnutrition.

Another way in which the author manages to bring the world of seventeenth century Britain to life is in his detailed descriptions of the flora, fauna, sights, smells and sounds of the landscapes through which Cromwell and his armies passed.⁹ The natural world is clearly a particular passion for Ronald Hutton, and he manages to evoke this vividly. It is highly idiosyncratic for a history book (I struggle to think of another example which does this to the same extent), but I felt it was effective.

The writing style is highly distinctive – the author combines meticulous examination of source evidence (for instance, a detailed examination of Oliver Cromwell’s opinions on drainage of the Fens in book one) with the occasional unsubstantiated sweeping statement. Early in the first book he claims that the English ‘traditionally despised’ the Scottish people as ‘inferior’. Elsewhere, he makes a similarly sweeping claim about English views of the Welsh. He can also be entertainingly catty in his descriptions: Grey of Groby (a Parliamentarian soldier) is described as ‘a classic dim-witted posh boy: young, genial, weak-willed and hesitant’, whilst Sir John Hotham (another Parliamentarian soldier, later executed with his son by Parliament for treachery) is described as ‘rich, arrogant, conceited, duplicitous and fundamentally inept’.

I preferred the second book over the first book. The first book gets off to a slow start because of the paucity of surviving information for Cromwell’s early life. This is something we are repeatedly reminded of; after the first few dozen pages, I started to dread reading phrases such as ‘we don’t know’ and ‘it is not clear’ – a more general disclaimer would have sufficed for much of this section. The evidence and the book improve significantly, in lockstep, as Cromwell’s political and military career progresses.

In the second book, the author is more willing, or able, to step back and see the wood for the trees; provide some perspective and add some insights to his obvious exhaustive knowledge of the subject matter. If I was rating the two books individually, I’d give the first book three stars and the second book five stars, so four stars is an average for the two. Overall, the two books together are highly rewarding and I’m looking forward to the third.

Conclusion

The Cromwell that emerges from these two books is a much more slippery character than I had previously appreciated. With some minor caveats, I found the characterisation of Oliver Cromwell in these books entirely plausible. The author combines exacting standards of scholarship with a unique writing style to create what was, for me, one of the most entertaining and enlightening historical biographies I have read.

Regarding the Scottish campaign, it is noted that ‘Scotland’s acceptance of Charles II had cost it very dear: for the only time in its entire history, it had been properly conquered by the English, and in the process had probably lost around 10 per cent of its entire adult made population, a casualty rate exceeding that of any European state in either the First or Second World War’. Having a quick look at the Wikipedia pages on casualties in the First or Second World Wars, I think this is debatable, but I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy of this claim. ↩︎
I will certainly read the third book when it comes out and may review that one separately when it does. ↩︎
A useful piece of advice for many modern historians. ↩︎
A counterargument would point to Oliver Cromwell’s encouragement of Jews to move to England, which perhaps indicates a more general willingness to tolerate alternative religions. I expect this will be addressed in book three. ↩︎
The point is made that Charles I was also king of Scotland and Ireland at the time, but that the Scots and Irish didn’t get any say in the decision to execute him. ↩︎
This was a motivation which Cromwell shared with many of those involved in the events of this era, albeit religious motivations could lead in different directions. Ronald Hutton points out that Charles I was strongly driven by his commitment to traditional Anglicanism - his refusal to compromise on some of his own beliefs probably contributed to his execution. ↩︎
The Blazing World by Jonathan Healey (reviewed by me elsewhere on this website) notes that many involved on the Parliamentary side in the English Civil Wars were influenced by deeply held beliefs about the constitution and the accountability of those in power to those they ruled. ↩︎
As in, it sounds feigned to a modern audience – like many successful politicians, Cromwell probably believed his own propaganda. ↩︎
The author admits that there is little indication that Cromwell himself had any interest in the natural world. ↩︎

We the People - review

2026-03-20T00:00:00Z

Our review of We the People: A History of the US Constitution, by Jill Lepore, first published in September 2025.

Examining the US constitution and how it has been amended (or more, often not amended) We the People is the product of enormous and meticulous research.

It is also very timely, given the many stresses and strains which America‘s system of checks and balances is currently being subjected to. Unfortunately, I found it a bit of a slog. This is one for American history and politics buffs rather than casual observers.

★★★☆☆

Asked in 2025 whether he had a duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution Trump said, 'I don't know.' >>> Jill Lepore, We the People

This book was a birthday present from our website founder, Anthony Webb. It's quite a departure for me. I admit to knowing very little about American history. So, it's good to get a bit of exposure to an area of history about which I know little.

The Amendments Project

The book is the product of the Amendments Project (of which the Jill Lepore is the Project Director) described on its website as a 'searchable archive of the full text of nearly every amendment to the U.S. Constitution proposed in Congress between 1789 and 2022 (more than 11,000 proposals); records of petitions introduced in Congress between 1789 and 1949 that propose, support, or oppose constitutional amendments (more than 9,000 petitions); and thousands of proposed amendments that never made it to Congress'. Of those thousands of proposed amendments, thirty-three have been proposed by the United States Congress and sent to the states for ratification, and twenty-seven have been ratified by the states and now form part of the Constitution. Of those twenty-seven successful amendments, one amendment (the twenty-first) repeals the eighteenth amendment (prohibiting the manufacturing or sale of alcohol).

The Amendments Project states that 'since the 1970s, the U.S. Constitution has become effectively un-amendable, chiefly due to widening political polarization'. A central contention of the book appears to be that the Constitution is too difficult to amend. To consider this, it's worth taking a moment to consider the process for amending the Constitution, which I didn't understand prior to reading this book.

How to amend the constitution

The amendment process is set out in Article V of the Constitution. It's a two-stage process:

Firstly, an amendment must be proposed. This can be done in one of two ways:

by the U.S. Congress, with the approval of a two-thirds majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives; or
by a national convention, which can be requested by the legislature of two-thirds of the states. This option has never been used.

Secondly, a proposed amendment is sent to the states for ratification. Ratification can either be from:

the legislatures of three-fourths of the states; or
approval by state ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states. The only amendment to be ratified by this method is the twenty-first amendment repealing prohibition.

So, essentially, amendment has almost always followed option 'a' for both proposal and ratification (i.e. proposed by U.S. Congress followed by ratification by state legislatures).

Under Article V, one provision is unamendable (without the consent of all states): equal representation in the Senate (i.e. each state gets two senators, regardless of the population of the state).

Original sin

For me, the most interesting parts of the book were the opening chapters exploring the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. I enjoyed the insights into American society at that time and the Founding Fathers.

Slavery looms large in American history, which will come as a surprise to nobody. The cracks in American politics were there from the start. Vermont's first constitution, drafted in 1777, prohibited slavery. But the right to own slaves was passionately defended by the Southern states at the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787. Slavery infused the public and private lives of many of the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson had multiple children with his slave, Sally Hemings. Those children were born into slavery. The idea of someone's child also being their slave struck me as peculiar. But apparently it was quite common in certain circles. In fact, Sally's own mother was her father's slave, and Sally was her father's slave.¹

After a lot of back and forth and heated arguments, the 1787 Constitution eventually permitted slavery, without actually using that word (which was considered to be too much of a stain), because the alternative would have been the Southern states seceding from the Union (which they tried to do during the Civil War when the issue came up again). The Constitution also contained the very strange 'three-fifths rule', by which slaves counted as 'three-fifths' of a person for the purposes of the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives, even though those 'persons' had no right to exercise votes themselves. In this way, the Southern states got to have their cake (slavery) and eat it (over-representation in the House of Representatives). If nothing else, that proves the power of obstinacy as a negotiating tactic.

What is the point of a constitution?

A text is made of woven letters; a textile is made of woven threads

Jill Lepore, We the People

Two themes which come from the book are that the author thinks the Constitution is too difficult to amend (she tells us that 'Article V hasn't worked since 1971'); and that she is opposed to (or at least sceptical about) 'originalism' (which is a theory of constitutional interpretation which seeks to understand the intention of the persons who wrote and ratified the Constitution) and instead favours the idea of the Constitution as a 'living organism'².

At times, I would have liked the book to have dug a little deeper into some of the questions which lay beneath its surface. For example, what is the purpose of a written constitution and 'fundamental' law (i.e. laws that cannot be amended except by a supermajority)? It's a question the book never addresses.

A fair defence might be that this is a book of history, rather than political science. Nonetheless, some of the themes which are raised by the book are difficult to properly assess without posing some of those questions. For example, if the idea of fundamental law is to make some laws more difficult to change than others, then surely changing a constitution should be difficult?

Antonin Scalia (a Supreme Court judge 1986 to 2016) said the whole purpose of the Constitution was to prevent change. On a purely logical level, doesn't he have a point? Plenty of fair criticisms can be made of the people and process by which the original Constitution was drafted and agreed – in particular, the persons doing so were unrepresentative of the world they lived in. No women, black men, or indigenous Americans were present at the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in 1787.

But that raises a fundamental dilemma which the book never addresses. If it is unfair for one generation to create laws which bind a future generation, then can a written constitution ever be legitimate? The UK has statutory provisions still in force which date back to the thirteenth century,³ but those can be repealed or amended at any time by an Act of Parliament, as the UK is one of the few countries in the world which does not have a written constitution. I would have been interested to hear what the author thought the value of a written constitution is and how such a document can have democratic legitimacy.

Constitutional politics

It seems history matters to this Court only when it is convenient

Justice Sonia Sotomayor reacting to Trump v. United States

American constitutional history is a window into the strange world of American politics. American politics may be polarised, but certain ideas enjoy broad cross-party appeal – for example, that imposing your political views on others through Constitutional amendment and/or interpretation is a good idea.

An American political novice might ask why people who favour or oppose something (for example, guns, abortion) don't merely seek to pass (or oppose the passing) of state or federal laws which favour their own perspective. But for the politically [or morally? ed] motivated American, of left or right, having their own opinion enshrined in the Constitution or validated by the Supreme Court always appears to be the more attractive option.

What did I think of the book?

We have at last so far got through the wearisome business of amendments, we may never hear any more of it

Benjamin Goodhue, delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention, 23 August 1787

The above quote came to mind as I made my way through 581 pages of petitions and sub-committees. The opening of the book, dealing with the founding of the United States, is very interesting, as was parts of it dealing with the Civil War period, but I found some of the other sections a bit long-winded and digressive – there's a lot about the constitutional history of Hawai'i which, whilst interesting, might have benefited from being more succinct.⁴

The author tells us that the 'countless numbers' of constitutional amendments which have failed 'count for rather a lot'. They are certainly a fascinating perspective on the debates which have raged about the Constitution from its inception. One proposal for an amendment of the Constitution would have led to the development of an 'Intergalactic AMERICA'. I expect this idea would find favour with the current administration.

Conclusion

The heavens turned. Wars were won and lost. Constitutions were written and rewritten. A republic became an empire and once more a republic. The grass grew, the sun rose, the seas spread, and the waters ran red with blood.

Jill Lepore, We the People⁵

This book has much to recommend it. It is obviously the product of enormous and meticulous research. It is also very timely, given the many stresses and strains which America's system of checks and balances is currently being subjected to. I think Anthony bought this for me hoping that it would be a ringing endorsement of an idea and document under threat of neglect. Strangely, the author's perspective on the Constitution is quite sceptical, in respect of both its origins and its subsequent resistance to change.

Sally Haming's father was John Wayles. He had a legitimate daughter called Martha Wayles who married Jefferson, which made her Sally's half-sister. ↩︎
Unless I missed it, I don't believe the book ever provides an explanation of what this means. I suspect an 'originalist' would argue that it means judges inventing constitutional rights depending on their own politics. I would have been interested to hear the author's counterargument to that. ↩︎
The oldest English statute still in force is the Statute of Marlborough (1267) which I am informed by ChatGPT is 'older than Downton Abbey'. ↩︎
The author uses the story of a quilt made by Queen Liliʻuokalani of Hawai'i whilst imprisoned, reflecting on aspects of Hawai'ian history, as a framework for this section of the book, which I did feel was an effective device. ↩︎
The author is keen on the occasional rhetorical flourish, which is hopefully evident from some of the quotes given here. ↩︎

The Wolf Age - review

2026-03-08T00:00:00Z

Our review of The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, by Tore Skeie, first published in October 2021.

A compelling and engaging romp through the intertwined English and Scandinavian histories at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Illuminating a time which has always been murky for me, it also brings to the fore one of England’s most underrated kings: Æthelred the Resilient.

★★★★★

In my children’s primary school the virtue of resilience is explicitly encouraged.¹ Picking yourself up, dusting yourself down and having another go is indeed important in life. However one area where they are missing a trick in moulding the youth of London is with their resilience role models, who tend to be over-achieving astronauts, scientists and other such alienating figures.

I would suggest instead that kids are taught to follow the example of Æthelred the Unready, who emerges from the pages of The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Battle for the North Sea Empire by Tore Skeie as an unexpectedly inspiring historical figure.

Æthelred was thrust unexpectedly onto the throne of Anglo-Saxon England in 978 when his elder brother King Edward the Martyr (described as a “quick-tempered, moody and unstable” 15 year old) was “spontaneously” stabbed to death by a group of thanes. Æthelred ruled for the subsequent 35 years, and, despite being spectacularly unsuccessful in all that time, losing battle after battle, plans going awry on land and on sea, he never gave up, kept coming back time and time again, before dying peacefully in his bed of an unidentified wasting illness aged 48.

If you can meet with disaster after disaster...

Let’s dig into a timeline of that uplifting record:

In the decade of the 990s he endured losing not one but two large armies, the first slaughtered, the second ran away. Constant Viking raiding went on more or less unchecked. He made two massive payoffs in silver (3.5 tonnes then 5 tonnes) to get the Vikings to go away. But crucially, he didn’t give up.
Undaunted, over the next decade of the 1000s Æthelred worked hard to build up England’s fortifications, again in the context of continual attacks, but to no effect. He lost two large armies once more (with his family members among the dead). Even worse he lost a brand new fleet of 200 ships built at enormous effort. This was before the fleet had even made contact with the enemy: two of his chiefs attacked each other while they were waiting for the Vikings to show up. Another monster bribe of 12 tonnes of silver was paid.
In the 1010s, despite his disastrous record Æthelred didn’t give up. He paid more bribes, including successfully enticing the Viking Number Two (Thorkell the Tall) over to his side. Unfortunately this didn’t help Æthelred resist the largest Viking invasion yet, now aiming to conquer England completely. Æthelred made a strategic retreat to his in-laws in Normandy. In a rare piece of good luck, the Viking leader Sweyn Forkbeard died just as he was about to go and collect the English crown, and Æthelred launched a lightning invasion from France, successfully reclaiming the throne.

In the end Æthelred fell sick and left his son Edmund Ironside to fight his battles for him (with much greater success). Despite Æthelred’s many defeats his enemies could never finish him off, but his illness could and Æthelred finally died on 23rd April 1016.

Æthelred the Resilient

Resilience is all very well when you are talented. But it is even more impressive when you are consistently unequal to the occasion.

Despite 35 years of constant failure in his job as king to keep his people safe, Æthelred’s resilience and self-belief never wavered.

Which is why I am starting a petition² to posthumously rename “Æthelred the Unready” to “Æthelred the Resilient”, which is step one in my plan to make the study of his life mandatory for all primary school children in the UK.

The saintly plunderer

The other main character in this story also has an undeserved reputation: Saint Olaf, credited with bringing Christianity to Norway. Whereas Æthelred has been undervalued by posterity, Olaf has experienced the reverse with highly undeserved praise. While he did indeed play a role in bringing The Church to Norway - albeit motivated by greed and self interest - he also brought murder, rape and destruction to Norway and everywhere else with a coast line, including England, France, Portugal, and (then Muslim) Southern Spain.

What’s in the book?

The narrative of the book covers the reign of Æthelred from 978 to a little while after his death in 1016, however the story is told on a much broader canvas covering the “North Sea world”: Scandinavia and England, with a bit of Normandy and Iceland thrown in too, and guest appearances from Spain and Portugal.

One cannot really understand the history of England in this period without understanding Scandinavian history, and one cannot really understand Scandinavian history without understanding English history.

Tore Skeie, The Wolf Age

For example “Saint Olaf” would not have been able to fund his takeover of the territory of what is now Norway without the silver he had pilfered and extorted from England. And his ‘modern’ vision for a strong kingship - with a more obedient set of subjects - came from role models in Christian Europe, where a monotheistic religion matched nicely with a mono-rex style government. There’s only room for one big guy and you better do what he says!

England was more obviously impacted by the Vikings as it was pummelled and plundered remorselessly for 35 years straight before being taken over by the Viking king Cnut.

Skeie is also keen to point out the similarities between English and Scandinavian societies of the time - and indeed broader European societies - where power went hand-in-hand with a ruthless dominating brutality and warring with neighbours was just what kings did. What made the Vikings special was not necessarily their bad behaviour but the fact that they were so good at it.

Style guide

The Wolf Age is a breezy read: a gripping narrative makes the years fly by.

Skeie also nicely mixes in a bit of context every now and again which varies the pace nicely as well as providing some behind-the-scenes insight. For example there is a section on ‘Viking religion’, a bit on Viking kingship, what it is like to be a foot soldier in a 10th century marauding army³, a section on Viking soldiers and their equipment⁴, and so on.

While the focus is on readability and engagement the author does also - I think! - try to follow the sources. They point out where evidence for what happened is lacking and where people disappear and reappear in the historical record.

Any problems?

The only thing I found a bit frustrating was that the sources that Skeie usese are often obscured. For example every now and again Skeie will set out a direct quote, such as:

King, I have heard that your men cast bodies in great heaps,
far from the ships they turned Ringmere Heath red with blood

A Viking skald (presumably Sigvat?) recounting ‘Saint’ Olaf’s victory at the Battle of Ringmere in a Norwegian mede hall

...but it is left to the reader to figure out the details of where the text comes from. So I think the above quote comes from a person called Sigvat but this relies on my own detective work and the accuracy of Wikipedia.

I guess this is in keeping with the popular history book vibe, but it left me feeling adrift at times: if I hear a voice echoing down to me from the past I would like to know who is speaking.

What I most appreciated

What I enjoyed most about the book was the way it carries you along with the story in all its bloody excitement, but without at all revelling in the violence:

In the year 1007, he [Olaf Harraldsson] is said to have left his home town and, like many others of his standing, embarked on an honourable career of violence, robbery and destruction.

Tore Skeie, The Wolf Age, describing ‘Saint’ Olaf’s first forays into the wider world

...and also without cheering for one side or the other, just giving you a strong sense of the mad compelling logic of the decades-long slaughter.

In short Skeie masterfully steers us between the whirlpool of blinkered anachronism and the rocks of abject relativitivity.

Conclusion

A compelling and engaging romp through the intertwined English and Scandinavian histories at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Illuminating a time which has always been murky for me, it also brings to the fore one of England’s most underrated kings: Æthelred the Resilient.

I don’t remember this from my own primary school days, where arithmetic tended to get more air time instead. ↩︎
Or at least I will be starting a petition as soon as I can source the 5 email addresses, as required by the UK government petition website that I need to get it off the ground. ↩︎
Apparently it was pretty boring most of the time, traipsing around in small gangs trying to get hold of food for you and the rest of the army. ↩︎
I was surprised to find out that (a) the Viking raiders represented only the ‘upper class’ of their societies (with the peasant farmers staying back home) and that at the same time (b) most of them were armed with spears not swords because swords were ‘expensive high status weapons’. Maybe you need more training to fight with a sword too, because surely most Vikings would have been able to afford splurging on a nice sword with their ill-gotten gains? ↩︎

New history books in February 2026

2026-03-03T00:00:00Z

A slightly sparser list of new history books this month (Feb 2026, in hardback in the UK). The two that I am curious to find out a bit more about are:

Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, by Frank Dikötter. The thesis being that the Communists in China were no different to their Nationalist Guomingdang opponents, so there was no 'moral' component to their victory. Having not yet read the book I am not yet convinced!
The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy, by Josh Ireland. Another compelling / horrific movie plot from the past. I expect an exciting, made for cinema style book.

Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.

The full list:

📕 Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity
📘 A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust
📔 Members Behaving Badly: A History of Britain in 52 Parliamentary Rogues
📗 The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London
📙 The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin's Greatest Enemy
📓 A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe's Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence
📒 Mad Tom's Rising: The Revolutionary Mystic Sir Wiliam Courtenay and the Last Battle Fought on English Soil
📙 The Great Resistance: The 400-Year Fight to End Slavery in the Americas
📘 Athena's Sisters: Reclaiming the Women of Classical Athens
📔 Saving Byzantium: The Struggle to Salvage an Empire
📗 Runes: A Concise History

On Pedantry - review

2026-02-22T00:00:00Z

Our review of On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All, by Arnoud S. Q. Visser, first published in November 2025.

A history of anti-intellectualism in the western world from the Greeks onwards, Visser makes this potentially dry subject entertaining by focussing on the character and caricatures of the pedant.

Apart from a minor grammatical error on page 237, I found On Pedantry a worthwhile and enjoyable read ;-)

★★★☆☆

Of splendid books I own no end
But few that I can comprehend.
I cherish books from various ages
And keep the flies from off the pages.

Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools (1494)

The rhyme reciting bibliophile quoted above is one of the many Western European (and North American) pedants that Arnoud Visser introduces to us in On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All.

One interesting fact about this bibliophile buffoon is that he is the very first nitwit out of the over 100 different types of fools that Brant included in his hugely influential book, which aimed to catalogue every type of nincompoop. Clearly the literary pedant - who loved his books dearly but never read any of them - was expected to strike a chord with readers 500 years ago. As indeed he does with me today!

What is a pedant?

But is he really a pedant? I don’t want to come across as pedantic myself of course, but I would have labelled him as an idiot more than anything else, or perhaps a chump.

When I was a child for example, my mum, whenever she felt I was winning an argument on a technicality, would say to me with great relish: “You pedant!” suggesting that for her pedantry meant priggishly insisting on minor points and willfully ignoring what really matters.

However, as Visser tells us, the definition of what a pedant is has shifted over the past thousand years or so: but at the heart of the accusation of pedantry is someone who is considered insufferably intellectual in one way or another.

Which means that this book is fundamentally a history of anti-intellectualism, told through the lens of various eggheads who got up other people’s noses.

Grumbling Greeks

So where did it all start? Visser kicks off with the ancient Greeks and specifically the Athenians, reminding us that despite all the philosophers “it was also a culture with strong anti-intellectual sentiments”.

“Sophists” in particular were a target of the brainbox bashers. Tutors to the very rich, sophists would train them in the arts of rhetoric and argument. However their financial motivation and potentially slippery attitude to right and wrong was problematic.

The play ‘The Clouds’ written by Aristophanes in 423 BCE humorously riffs on these attitudes.

Cloudy reasoning

The story of the play follows a young man called Pheidippides who has been sent to the sophist ‘Thinking Institute’ by his father, in order to become sufficiently skilled at argument to get dad off the hook for his mounting debts.

The plan is initially a success, and Pheidippides comes up with an ingenious yet specious logic to get out of paying up “based on the ambiguous naming of the final days of the month on which the debts were due”.

Unfortunately Pheidippides doesn’t stop there and also beats his father up (I’m not totally sure why), devising another argument to justify this shocking and unsettling behaviour.

Heated debate

Ultimately the father, also under the influence of the Sophists, goes slightly mad and denies the existence of the gods, before coming to his senses and burning the Thinking Institute to the ground.

The Sophists in the play, while ludicrous, are also a subversive and potentially dangerous element in Athenian society. Knowledge is a dangerous thing, if not anchored by upright morals.

Reproachful Romans

The journey through Western civilization continues with the Romans who had a love-hate relationship with intellectuals. Visser notes that:

In the first century a range of emperors, including Nero, Vespasian and Domitian, had issued decrees expelling philosophers from Rome, or even Italy as a whole.

Arnoud S. Q. Visser, On Pedantry

Critical Christians

Then onto the middle ages where learning went hand in hand with Christianity. Tenth century intellectualism had at its core an intimate master-student relationship: correspondence between students and masters is apparently full of dramatic protestations of affection. “Countless tears are wept, jealous suspicions thrown about, sweet wishes uttered.”

When a new school of thought, scholasticism, emerged in the twelfth century, based on logic rather than practical ethics, the “old qualities of charismatic masters... came to be seen as pompous, verbose pedantry.”

Horrendous Humanists

On to the Renaissance, where uppity humanists, were associated with sexual deviancy and sodomy despite the fact that “teachers and students [in Florence] represent only 0.6% of cases in the records of the criminal tribunal for sodomy.” These derogatory accusations, Visser tells us, stemmed from the nobility who felt threatened and affronted by these free-thinking jumped-up big-mouthed smart-alecs.

Founding Philistines

The last part of the book heads over to North America where anti-intellectualism is present from the inception of the United States: Thomas Paine chose to write the foundational text “The Rights of Man” in a deliberately home-spun and plain-speaking style.

Fifty years later the 1828 presidential election pitted the intellectually inclined incumbent John Quincy Adams against Andrew Jackson, a “barely literate” war hero. The electorate had just been expanded: you no longer needed to own property to vote. And some of the new voters at least felt that literary dexterity was a disqualification for high office. “I never found a dictionary man who was not half a fool - I’m for Hickory [Andrew Jackson], I believe” one farmer reportedly said. Andrew Jackson won the election.

The last chapter homes in on pedantic professors in the twentieth century who, when negatively portrayed in the first half of the century, were shown as authoritarian bullies, and then often as pathetic misfits in the second half of the century, as their purchasing power parity declined.

Style guide

On Pedantry is probably the most readable history of anti-intellectualism that you will come across. Visser has a dry sense of humour and is always on the lookout for a good anecdote. I liked the way he started each chapter with a dictionary definition, a tongue in check homage to the pedantic dictionary men and women.

That said, it is not really a page turner and as a reader you have to put a certain amount of effort in to stay with it.

Conclusion

What I liked most about the book was the way it contextualised the anti-intellectualism that we come across nowadays.

By presenting a long history of anti-intellectualism essentially as a power struggle between competing world views (in which the accusation of pedantry is often just a handy weapon) it helped me to think about the power struggles of today from a new angle. It also gave me a new way to think about the power struggles with my mum two or three decades ago!

New history books in Jan 2026 (and Dec 2025)

2026-02-08T00:00:00Z

I have combined January and Decemeber to give myself a break over xmas. However it turns out that there was not much out in December anyway and a much greater number in January so it worked out well. A few that caught my eye are:

Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union As a Civilization, 1953-1991, by Mark B. Smith. Charting the attempt to fulfill the promise of socialism, this looks like a balanced and insightful account.
First Kings: Forged by Vikings in England and Norway, by R. A. J. Waddingham. The second history book written by my now retired ex-boss: I watch his progress with considerable interest. Is it any good? I hope so!
Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, by Kim Bowes. I'm always curious about the Roman have-nots, and the have-not-muches - what was life really like?
Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East, by Yossef Rapoport. This book addresses a question I have never really been able to get a handle on - what does it mean to be Arab and when did people switch over from what it was they indentified as previously?

Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.

The full list:

📕 The Six Loves of James I
📘 Money and the Making of the American Revolution
📔 The Desire for Syria in Medieval England
📗 The Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Prince
📕 Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union As a Civilization, 1953-1991
📘 A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars
📔 The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires
📗 The Black Cross: A History of the Baltic Crusades
📙 Worlds of Islam: A Global History
📓 First Kings: Forged by Vikings in England and Norway
📒 Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent
📙 The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World
📘 The Man Who Stopped the Sultan: Gabriele Tadino and the Defence of Europe
📔 Prague: The Heart of Europe
📗 Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East
📕 Berenice: Queen in Roman Judea
📘 Borneo: The History of an Enigma

Rhyme and Reason - review

2025-12-19T00:00:00Z

Our review of Rhyme and Reason: A Short History of British Poetry, by Mark Forsyth, first published in October 2025.

A beginner friendly tour of the history of English poetry, and therefore a tour of English cultural history too.

If you like me you appreciate poetry in an abstract sense, but find it tedious and obscure in practice, this is the book for you: it succeeds in turning the impenetrable into the engaging.

★★★★☆

Hail-stones as big as eggs apace down fell,
And some much bigger, as I hear some tell:
Who took them up as they lay on the ground, And measured, they were found eight inches round.
~
And fourteen ounces two of them did weigh,
As one who weighed them unto me did say:
It is so strange, and yet so very true,
The like before no mortal ever knew.

From “A Ballad of a Strange and Wonderful Storm of Hail which fell in London on the 18th of May 1680, which hurt several men, killed many birds and spoiled many trees; with other strange accidents, the like never before known in England.”

We live in a poetic desert. As Mark Forsyth observes in Rhyme and Reason: a short history of poetry and people (for people who don’t usually read poetry): nowadays we only recite poems at weddings and funerals and even then we say them wrong.

But this is an anomaly, from an historical perspective. For most of the last few hundred years poetry was an integral part of the lives of the majority of British people¹. Youngsters would declaim lengthy poems by heart, grown men would weep at poetry recitals, and news reports (in the 17th century) would often be delivered in poetic form - such as the report on the freak hailstorm above which “killed many birds”.

Let's start at the very beginning

Forsyth leads us from the desert to the green pastures of the past when poetry flourished, all starting with The Book of the Duchess in 1368 which was written by a minion of the royal powerhouse John of Gaunt, named Geoffrey Chaucer, in commemoration of John’s recently deceased and much missed wife.

The poem which starts thusly:

I have gret wonder, be this lighte,
How that I live, for day ne nighte
I may nat sleepè well nigh noght,
I have so many an idle thoght
Purely for defaute of slepe

...is special for:

Being the first poem written in English from which you can trace an unbroken line to the rest of English poetry.
Taking a rhyming French verse structure and giving it in addition a de-dum de-dum de-dum de-dum rhythm.

There had been poems in England before this (Beowulf springs to mind) but “they didn’t lead to anything” we are told, so it was Chaucer who kicked it all off.

Poems for the ages

We are then taken step by step through the changing tastes of the English public as consumers of poetry, and the changing types of English people who consumed them.

The idea of this book is reasonably simple. In each age I try to find the typical consumer of poetry. I try to establish who they were, what class they were from, and in what precise physical circumstances they got their poems. Then I try to establish why they might have liked or disliked the poetry. Then I give you a couple of poems.

Mark Forsyth, accurately summarising his book Rhyme and Reason

One of the aims of the book is to help you (me) the reader understand how to read poems, to find the rhythm of them. In this I felt it succeeded brilliantly.

Personally I felt like I had just the right level of knowledge to get the most out of this book, which is almost total ignorance. Alongside this ignorance I’m also quite dissatisfied with my own inability to appreciate in poems what other people seem to find so special.

When you know the notes to sing

Forsyth is the perfect guide for this sort of willing ignoramus, and will often (for example) mark in bold the syllables that need stressing in a poem to get you started.

I grieve and dare not show my discontent;
I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;
I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.
I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,
Since from myself another self I turned.

Queen Elizabeth I, aged 46, whose marriage negotiations had just recently broken down.

This sort of hand holding for the reader is great and something I think should be incorporated into more poetry publications. Paradise Lost with Stressed Syllables in Bold may not become an instant best seller but you never know these days with the TikTok crowd.

Through a glass, clearly

Forsyth is also refreshingly plain speaking in how he views the poems and poets of the past, removing them from their pedestals, and bringing them down to earth.

For example when introducing us to the most popular poet by far in the eighteenth century, Lord Byron, and his first blockbuster narrative poem, title: Childe Harold, Forsyth opines as follows:

The odd thing about Childe Harold is that nothing actually happens. Childe Harold is deep and brooding and alienated, but he just looks at stuff, and moves on. The whole thing, today, feels like being shown somebody’s holiday snaps, which is a tedious business, even if the person showing you is really intense about it.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is boring.

Mark Forsyth, Rhyme and Reason

By making ‘great poems’ less intimidating, Forsyth makes them more accessible, and so more enjoyable.

The focus of the book is on poems that were read at the time and while this overlaps reasonably well with our current canon of "great poetry", it also surfaces more poets and poems that circulated widely in the past but have been forgotten nowadays - such as patriotic female second world war poets writing from the home front.

What I got out of the book

After I finished the book I felt I had got:

A history of what poems English (sometimes British) people were reciting and listening to over time - and why poetry died out in the twentieth century.
Light hearted but effective instructions on how to read poems, and find their rhythm.
A taster menu for a bunch of poems and poets for you to look up yourself later, if you want.

Anything not to like?

The best parts of this book are where the author’s personality and enthusiasm shines through.

The one or two bits that jarred with me were also where the author’s personality shines through, with an occasional “we hate the French” Dad’s Army style humour that made me cringe. But thankfully this only pops up on a few occasions.

Conclusion

The author guides you gently by the hand through the history of English poetry, and therefore a central part of English cultural history too.

If you like poetry in an abstract sense, but find it tedious and obscure in practice, Rhyme and Reason is the book for you: it succeeds in turning the commonplace into the compelling.

Presumably this is also the case for other European people too but Forsyth’s is focused on Britain (and mostly England). ↩︎

An Accidental History of Tudor England - review

2025-12-12T00:00:00Z

Our review of An Accidental History of Tudor England: From Daily Life to Sudden Death, by Steven Gunn, Tomasz Gromelski, first published in June 2025.

My history book of the year. I would enthusiastically recommend this as a marvellous Christmas present for anyone interested in Tudor England, accidental death, or both.

★★★★★

Disclaimer: the reviewer is an ex-student of Professor Steven Gunn.

The English were, historically, good at paperwork. As a solicitor myself, this is something which I greatly admire. By the late Middle Ages, England had, by European standards, a relatively sophisticated system of investigating and recording deaths; in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, that system was increasingly codified into statute. In 1487, an Act of Parliament was passed which commanded coroners to hand in their inquest reports to the assize judges, who brought them back to the Court of King's Bench in Westminster where they were filed.

This was then followed by an Act in 1510 which ordered coroners to make sure they held inquests on all sudden deaths, not just homicides, and do so speedily so that bodies would not lie 'longe above ground unburyed to the great noyaunce of the Kynges leage people'.

Getting the facts straight

So, if you lived in Tudor England and were unfortunate enough to suffocate to death in a pool of mud (which could in fact happen) then you would at least have the satisfaction of knowing in your last moments that a nice gentlemen would turn up and ensure that all the details of your death were properly recorded.

That person (the coroner) would summon a jury, ask that jury questions (when did you die? how? etc.) and the jury (perhaps composed of your neighbours and / or work colleagues) would provide answers to the best of their abilities. The result was a coroners' inquest report which would, in most cases (but not all, different counties have different rules), find its way back to London to be filed away for posterity and with a pretty good survival rate.

Posterity then provided two diligent Oxford historians (Steven Gunn (professor of early modern history at Merton College, Oxford) and Tomasz Gromelski (research fellow at Wolfson College Oxford)) who have spent the last few years working their way through those reports (8,888 of them for the period 1500-1600, covering about half of the 9,000 or so parishes in England which existed at the time) to find out what we can learn.

It turns out we can learn rather a lot. I know they have been working on this for some time, as I sat next to one of them (a former tutor of mine) at a college dinner well over 10 years ago, and he was telling me about this project then.

Who do we have to thank?

This book left me with a great deal of respect for the coroners and the juries who put in the hard work to make sure that these things were done properly. Juries tended to be composed of what we might refer to nowadays as the middle classes (gentry, yeoman, etc.). By and large, they took their responsibilities seriously and discharged them with some diligence.

Inquests could be short or go on for months, but the reports are for the most part detailed, plausible, and serious minded. The authors note that, far from living up to contemporary stereotypes by ascribing accidents to divine (or diabolic) causes, the reports mostly seek non-supernatural explanations of the events described.

Why is it interesting?

The coroners' reports provide a window into the lives of ordinary Englishmen and women in a way offered by few other sources – anyone could (and did) die of accidents: the rich and the poor, the old and young, men and women, those living in towns and the countryside. They could also die in all sorts of situations – whilst at work, at play, whilst travelling or stationary.

Unlike many other sources, no particular categories of person are excluded. Diaries are an increasingly important source of evidence for this period (I have painful memories as a student, of Dr Gunn making me read the diary of a very dull Elizabethan Puritan lady) but by necessity required the writer to be literate.

The 8,888 coroner's reports cover 9,291 victims

Steve Gunn, Tomasz Gromelski, An accidental history of Tudor England

The 8,888 reports cover 9,291 victims, ranging from an 8-year-old who fell out of bed and into a fire while sleeping with his drunken widowed mother, to a man reputed to be 108 years old who fell from the roof of a stable reaching out for his thatcher's needle. The reports include the death of the 7-year-old Lord Dacre, the inheritor of a peerage title, who was crushed by his wooden vaulting horse. They also include the homeless and sometimes nameless, such as a girl who fell off the steps of a windmill after a night sheltering in a beacon house (where those tending the fire beacons to warn of foreign invasion kept themselves out of the weather).

As can be seen from the examples provided, what makes the inquest reports interesting is not just (or even primarily) what we can learn about accidental deaths themselves, but rather the adjacent information on the circumstances in which the accident occurred. Many of the reports provide detailed summaries of the events leading up to the accident. Sometimes that information is quite peripheral to the death itself, but gives fascinating insights in sixteenth century life, like the servants who rushed outside with a brass tub and a small cowbell to calm swarming bees and charm them into a hive (the actual death was of the unfortunate girl left behind, who fell into a tub of water).

Getting on with things

What we are given is a picture of everyday life in Tudor England. People often died doing everyday mundane things, like reading books or fetching water. This type of social history is for me the most interesting. As the authors note:

Conflict, change and resistance generated more evidence than simply getting on with things. But getting on with things is what most people did most days.

Steve Gunn, Tomasz Gromelski, An accidental history of Tudor England

The tone of the book is never flippant. The authors are respectful of the fact that these were real people, and the circumstances were often tragic (particularly the large numbers of unattended children who died, often through no fault of the parents, who had housework and chores which could not be left undone). The names of victims are always given.

We are also, occasionally, given glimpses of the more famous events and trends of the day. For example, Henry Skatergoode was hit on the head by a stone thrown down by a labourer dismantling the bell tower of a recently dissolved monastery. Henry Siesly, listening to a sermon, was hit on the head by a volume of the works of Heinrich Bullinger, the Zurich theologian popular with puritans.

The familiar and the strange world of Tudor England

One of the things I most enjoyed about this book is the mixture of the familiar and the strange. This is the type of history book which gives you a feel for a different time in a way that few other history books can achieve. What you get the sense of are people not that different from ourselves, going about their lives, working, travelling, and having fun.

The circumstances in which they do those things can be very different from our own, and make you reflect on the aspects of modern life that we would otherwise take for granted. In other ways, the challenges and situations they faced have similarities with those we face today.

The authors make the point that people were not needlessly careless with their own lives or the lives of those dependent on them – there is plenty of evidence for people taking safety precautions where it was possible to do so; but the nature of their lives and work often forced them to take risks that could not be avoided (for example, mothers and servants leaving children unattended in order to complete household chores).

Let's delve into some of these inadvertently hazardous activities...

Editor's interjection: you can have a look at the full dataset of accidents online, in handy csv or xlsx format. I looked up my childhood town of Newbury in Berkshire which appeared to be a relatively dangerous place to live, with the River Kennet being a particular hazard.

🌊 Beware the water

One aspect of modern life I have not previously given much thought to is access to water in our homes. In 16th century England, drowning was by far the most common cause of accidental death, making up 43% of reported accidental deaths, a far higher percentage than modern Britain (but not far off the percentage in certain developing countries today).

One of the reasons for this is that, unlike us, a Tudor householder had no direct access to water in the home.

Water collection led to nearly one in twenty accidental deaths, one in eight for women and girls over the age of five. Drinking, cooking with water, brewing, washing (yourself, your children, clothes, dishes), all required trips to the nearest water source, which might be a well, pond, or nearby river. This was often undertaken by women (housewives, children, servants) wearing multiple layers of heavy woollen clothing.¹ Water had to be collected year-round, often in icy conditions.

Others died falling off bridges which might be little more than wooden planks, sometimes while also trying to navigate across livestock or carts. John Tydde died whilst attempting to pole-vault across a stretch of water to check on his cattle (his stake snapped). People died whilst trying to save others from drowning, including their own children. Others (particularly the young) died whilst playing and having fun in water.

🛞 Travel, potholes, and mud

Like today, travelling by road could be dangerous. Carts and wagons accounted for one in six accidental deaths which is a higher proportion than road traffic deaths now. If modern cars feel dangerous, at least they have brakes – imagine trying to lead a horse and cart down a steep slope.

It turns out that England has also long had a problem with potholes and poorly maintained roads, which you may or may not find comforting next time your car's suspension is ruined. Francis Turner broke his neck jumping from his cart into a wheel-rut. The problem was so acute that it led to legislation in 1555, which noted that:

highways were “nowe bothe verie noisome and tedious to travell in and dangerous to all passengers and cariages”

Steve Gunn, Tomasz Gromelski, An accidental history of Tudor England

A sentiment that many today will sympathise with.²

Following that legislation, there was an increasing incidence of accidents involving workmen maintaining roads.

💩 Death by mud and poo

If problems with potholes continue to plague us, thankfully death by mud is a less common hazard nowadays. In Tudor England, mud could be deadly. William Peers was crushed by his horse as it tried to drag itself out of a deep muddy pool in the middle of Henherst Lane in Staplehurst, Kent. Peter Cowles got stuck in mud on a walk and died of cold and exhaustion. Henry VIII got stuck in mud trying to jump over a stream whilst on a hawking trip but had a servant to drag him out.

Tudor poo was also dangerous. Geoffrey Lyteljohn had a 'jaques' set over a pond, but the seat broke at 3 a.m. when he was relieving himself. John Dunkyn, a Cambridgeshire baker, fell drunken backwards into a cess pit whilst pooing – the jurors said he was 'qweasomed' by the stench.

🚧 Working

Our working lives are generally safer today than they were in 16th century England. Work on the land involved multiple hazards. A surprisingly large number of accidents involved stacked crops falling on top of people – this was more deadly than firearms. Working with fish could also be dangerous - Henry Walytt died in Exton, Rutland, when a fish wrapped in a canvas cloth fell on top of him whilst he slept and suffocated him to death.³

Fruit was roughly as deadly as firearms (for example, a person might fall from a tree collecting fruit). One accident in six in Herefordshire involved a tree. Many accidents occurred in or around mills, where the combination of heavy machinery and powerful forces could be fatal.

Work related accidents happened to children as well. For the typical Tudor householder, work life and domestic chores were less demarcated than they are today, particularly for women and children. Children were put to work at a young age, either helping at home or as servants or apprentices elsewhere. For those between the ages of 7 and 13, numbers of accidental deaths arising from work and play were roughly equal.

⚽ Playing sport

If you managed to get through your working day without any mishaps, you might choose to unwind with a game of football with friends.

Football had no codified rules and appears to have been a cross between what we would call 'football' (in the UK meaning), rugby, with a bit of a general ruckus thrown in. In Cornwall, it was known as 'whurlyng' which gives some sense of the slightly chaotic nature of the game, which had few rules. Inevitably, it led to many accidents. Some embraced this side of the game, with Isaac Fakker calling out 'Let us make work for the surgeons' as he charged at his opponents.

Let us make work for the surgeons

Isaac Fakker playing football in Tudor England

A lot of sporting accidents involved falling on knives. The authors explain that almost everyone carried a knife with them, as it was the principal means of cutting up and eating food (forks were still relatively rare in this period); and it probably would not have been practical to leave a pile of knives on the sidelines whilst a game of football was played (both because of the risk of the knife being stolen and also because of arguments which may have ensued regarding which knife belonged to whom). As a result, it was usual for men to run around with knives still hanging on their belt. The resulting accidents are not then difficult to imagine.⁴

If running around playing a weird football/rugby mix whilst carrying a knife on your belt sounds dangerous, there were even riskier ways to entertain yourself. Wrestling was a favourite pastime for the Tudor Englishman, with the dividing line between play and confrontation not always easy to discern from the reports. Englishmen were required by law to practice archery with the longbow, and there were many accidents involving innocent bystanders being hit by stray arrows. But my personal favourite Tudor pastime is the game of 'throwing the sledgehammer' which substituted for football in the summer months. If the UK ever hosts the Olympic games again, hopefully we will push for its reintroduction.

🍺 Having fun and courtship

Some means of having fun have endured better than sledgehammer throwing. People today still enjoy dancing and having a drink, often in combination. Then, like now, the alcohol/dance combination could be used by young men in a forlorn attempt to impress young ladies. William Lamley, for example, fell into boiling water whilst drunkenly dancing on one leg whilst showing off to female servants.⁵

Accidents involving alcohol were, then as now, a common theme. George Hewet died whilst drunkenly propelling his boat down the Tyne paddling with his feet, one off each side. James Johnson, alias 'Harvie', was in the appropriately named Deadman's Lane in Southwark where he was 'barely possessed of a healthy and calm mind from his great drunkenness'. He pulled down his breeches to empty his bowels but fell into a ditch dead-first and suffocated in the water, mud, and filth. I used to live in Southwark myself and that story brought back some happy memories.

Love could (and still does) inspire rash behaviour, with or without the involvement of alcohol. A young man described as feeling an ardent desire for marriage ran towards a young lady who was holding a willow rod which accidentally poked him in the eye, killing him from the injury.

Final Destination

There were times when I felt like I was reading the script for a Final Destination movie set in Tudor England.⁶ Causes of death could be convoluted. Thomas Alsopp died in Coventry whilst standing in what had been the cemetery of the Greyfriars when a maypole fell over. It missed him but hit the city wall behind and dislodged a stone, which struck him on the head. There is more than one death by falling meat: Elizabeth Bowne, a servant, was sitting by the fire when four flitches of bacon fell from the chimney on top of her.

Conclusion

This is an excellent book which provides unique insights into the day to day lives of ordinary Tudor men and women. If you want to learn about how people lived (and died) in Tudor England, this is a great place to come.

The significance of the clothing is that if a person fell into a body of water, this type of clothing would make it particularly difficult to get out again. I was slightly confused by the frequency of drowning in Tudor England until this point was explained (particularly since drownings often seemed to occur in ditches and near the edges of ponds and rivers where you might assume the water would be relatively shallow). Other contributing factors may have been that most people did not know how to swim, and the incidents often occurred in cold/freezing weather when the body might experience shock on contact with water. The explanation is provided towards the end of the book but perhaps could have been useful nearer the start. ↩︎
This reminded me of a story recently told to me by a person from India. Apparently, in some of the bigger cities during monsoon season, there is a problem with people falling down uncovered flooded manholes, with the unfortunate individual often swept out to sea. ↩︎
It is tempting to assume that alcohol was involved in this incident, but the authors note that the coroners' reports were generally quite thorough in mentioning drunkenness, and none was mentioned in this case. It is possible that the 'fish' was a large aquatic mammal such as a porpoise. ↩︎
These did not happen only, or even principally, in a sporting context. People accidently cutting themselves with their own knives (often whilst falling over on top of them) is a recurrent theme of the book. ↩︎
Whilst not specified, it is presumably fair to assume that he had two legs (wouldn't the jury/coroner have mentioned otherwise?), and the one legged dance was therefore voluntary. ↩︎
At the time I thought this was a relatively original observation. Sadly, I listened to a podcast with Dr Gunn in which the interviewer made exactly the same comparison. ↩︎

The Last Dynasty - review

2025-12-05T00:00:00Z

Our review of The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, by Toby Wilkinson, first published in October 2024.

The Last Dynasty covers the rule of the Greek Ptolemies over Egypt for the 300 years until the Romans took.

Recommended! While not skimping on high politics and the scandalous behaviour of the Greek dynasty, it also gives us a flavour of life in the fields, the temples and in the minds of ordinary Egyptians too.

★★★★☆

Ancient Egypt has a history that spans an incredible amount of time. From 3100 BCE to 30 BCE there are 31 centuries, covering 33 dynasties, and 390 different pharaohs.¹

When my ancestors were feeling pleased with themselves for putting one stone on top of another stone at Stonehenge in ancient Britain, the Egyptians were piling up 2.3 million blocks of stone to make the Great Pyramid: 210 layers high².

It is all pretty impressive.

Which is perhaps why it is easy to overlook the odd few centuries here and there, a case in point being the last three centuries of Pharaonic Egypt, ruled over by the (Greek) Ptolemies. The only two I could have named before reading The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra by Toby Wilkinson were Ptolemy (the first one who was friends with Alexander the Great) and Cleopatra (the last one, who killed herself with (possibly) an asp).

Apparently I am not alone - Wilkinson tells us that this period is too late for the Egyptologists and too early for the Romanists - and so tends to get neglected. The oddity is that, measured by longevity, this is the most successful dynasty in the entire history of Egypt, at almost 300 years long.³ The Last Dynasty fills in this lacuna and introduces us to the full range of characters during the Ptolemaic dynasty, most of which are also called Ptolemy or Cleopatra, which makes them easy to remember but hard to tell apart.

A Ptotted History

So what happened?

It all starts with Alexander the Great, who conquers Egypt and everywhere else then dies. His general and childhood buddy Ptolemy gets his hands on Egypt in 323 BCE.

Ptolemy I is relatively unusual in trying to get along with the people he has conquered, even going to the extent of inventing a new god ‘Serapis’ to bring his Greek and Egyptian people together (“one of only a few historically attested examples of an invented deity”).

Ptolemy I has a son (also called Ptolemy) who succeeds in turn. Scandalously for his Greek subjects Ptolemy II divorced his first wife to marry his sister Arsinoe II. By contrast his Egyptian peoples considered this a sensible policy for a happier Egypt.

The Ptolemies were good at ostentation and Wilkinson describes the first Ptolemaieia - which was a sort of rival Olympic games. The opening parade through Alexandria was just as over the top as some of the modern Olympic opening ceremonies, including animals, fancy dress, treasure and:

a float bearing a 180-foot-long golden penis, wound around with golden ribbons and tipped with a gold star nine feet in circumference

Toby Wilkinson, The Last Dynasty

When his turn came, Ptolemy III also did a pretty good job and continued the intellectual achievements of his father and grandfather with the Alexandrian Mouseion and Library, boasting illustrious alumni such as Euclid, whose mathematical mastery of planes and solids may have been inspired by the geometric shape of the great pyramid itself.⁴

How to run a country

As well as the political side of things, Wilkinson delves into some of the inner workings of the Egyptian state, including the duties of a provincial governor’s deputy (called a household manager or oikonomos) which seem to have been to micro manage everything: from checking that the stipulated crops had been planted in each field, to the depth of the canal intakes. Advice was also given that:

During your tour of inspection try as you [go] about to encourage everybody and make them feel happier

memo from the finance minister of Ptolemy IV to an anonymous oikonomos

Things start to go wrong

Back to the politics.

Things started to go awry with Ptolemy IV (221 BCE), who was much more interested in chillaxing on his custom built super yacht, rather than doing important Pharaoh stuff.

He did fight and win a massive battle against the Ptolemies’ perennial enemy the Seleukids to the East, but because he had enrolled a lot of Egyptians into his army (for the first time) this laid the foundations for a massive revolt.

This revolt was followed by a massive military defeat, soon after Ptolemy V (his son) became king in 200 BCE, fighting the Seleukids again. Meanwhile the rebellion that had begun in 206 BCE was still going strong (and would last for more than twenty years, until 184 BCE).

Staying on message

In the context of a state that was under severe strain, Ptolemy V decided in 196 BCE to rally his people behind him by staging a “spectacular coronation” in Memphis (Cairo). Priests from around the country gathered together to issue a decree telling everyone what a fantastic chap Ptolemy V was and that statues of him should be put up all over the place. They went on to say:

a copy of the decree itself would be placed in every temple ‘of the first, second and third division’ – in other words, not just the major temples, but even relatively small shrines – with the text set down in ‘the writing of the divine words, the writing of documents, and the writing of the Ionians’: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek.

Toby Wilkinson, The Last Dynasty

You can see a copy of the decree in the British Library today - the only one which has so far been found - which has become famous as the Rosetta Stone. This decree was fundamental to the decipherment of hieroglyphics and therefore for Toby Wilkinson to write this book!

The Rosetta Stone © The Trustees of the British Museum

Rotten Romans

Ptolemy VI became Pharaoh as a six year old. Defeated by the Seleukids ten years later he needed the (humiliating) intervention of Rome to get them out of Egypt. Ptolemy VI died in 145 BCE with no heir.

Pterrible Ptolemies

The actions of his younger brother (and at one time co-ruler) Ptolemy VIII⁵, encapsulate the love-hate character of the ruling family’s intra-familial relationships.

First he married his brother’s widow and his own sister, in order to control this potential rival. Soon after having a son together “the king began a relationship with his niece, Cleopatra III. He wed her while he was still married to her mother, Cleopatra II – and elevated her to the rank of queen.” Again this outraged the Greek subjects. And again the Egyptians were more blasé - this was simply the divine royal family behaving the way gods have behaved since time began.

The mother and daughter Cleopatras became bitter rivals and eventually the rivalry erupted into civil war, with mum Cleopatra driving daughter Cleopatra and uncle Ptolemy out of Alexandria.

Ptolemy VIII then started to worry that his own son by mum Cleopatra might be a threat. To prevent any trouble it is reported that:

Ptolemy VIII then had his son’s body dismembered and the parts delivered to Cleopatra II [his sister, wife, brother's widow, plus his son's mother] in Alexandria, timed to arrive the night before her birthday celebrations.

Toby Wilkinson, The Last Dynasty

After this gruesome stunt and success on the battlefield, Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra III (the niece) regained control and it was Cleopatra II’s (the mum) turn to flee. Ptolemy VIII herded his sister’s supporters into the gymnasium at Alexandria and burned them all to death.

His position now secure, he spent most of the rest of his reign building and renovating temples, before proving there is no justice in the world by dying peacefully of natural causes in 116 BCE.

Power politics

From this point on it was more of the same: more Ptolemies, more Cleopatras, more incest, and a whole lot more infighting. All the while the Romans were getting stronger and closer. Eventually, when it comes to the Cleopatra that we all know (Cleopatra VII) it required some highly dextrous statecraft to turn Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony into Egyptian allies rather than despoilers, a feat which was not possible when Octavian defeated Mark Antony and marched into Egypt with his army.

The Romans were not interested in becoming pharaohs, they just wanted the money (and grain). So with the end of the Ptolemies came the end of a line of Egyptian pharaohs that was at least 3,000 years old.

Ptwo dimensional

What makes The Last Dynasty so interesting is that it goes much deeper than my one dimensional political summary above.

For example we have:

🗺️ A survey of the Hellenistic world around Egypt with Macedonia in the north, the vast Seleukids empire to the east, and Nubia to the south. Then a day trip to see the sights of Alexandria.
🌾 The economic foundations of the kingdom including drainage and land reclamation in districts like Fayum to bring more land under cultivation.
🖼️ Portraits of some ‘ordinary people’: their lives and livelihoods, such as the scribe Menkhes and his work in rural Egypt.
🏛️ Egyptian temples and religious life, including the bizarre animal mummification craze whereby “as many as 10,000 [ibis] birds were reared, mummified and buried in the Memphite necropolis every year”.
⚱️ The often tense relationship between Greeks and Egyptians, and, as far as possible, the Egyptian outlook.

For me these descriptions of ordinary life were the most interesting bits of the book - how the Geeks disrupted but also coexisted alongside the Egyptians was something I have wondered about in the past.

Any downsides?

The book is pretty easy to read and wears its scholarship lightly. I only started to lose track of the Ptolemies after the 8th one (as you might have guessed from my summary above) which I think says a lot for Wilkinson’s power to engage.

The only negative to highlight is that it does feel at times like it has been bashed out at speed, without too much care for the prose. This is mainly an issue when Wilkinson is describing the various cities, which sound at times like he is writing for the Ptolemaic Tourist Board, or an ancient lonely planet guidebook.⁶

Conclusion

The Last Dynasty covers a lot and does it well. If you have even a passing curiosity in the Ptolemies, or the Rosetta Stone, or the Greeks in general, or even the Romans I would recommend this book.

If you are an Allan Partridge fan you might also like to know that this is the same as 26.9 million episodes of the Darling Buds of May, 13.5 million episodes of Doctor Who or 53.8 million episodes of Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge. If you are more interested instead in how I counted Egyptian pharaohs you can see my google spreadsheet which counts Egyptian pharaohs (see sheet 2). The spreadsheet pulls data from this wikipedia list of pharaohs (which hopefully is the consensus view) and then lines all the pharaohs up in a single column. If I have got any of this wrong please update the wikipedia page directly and with a bit of luck it will all pull through. I’m 100% certain that I’m not the first person to count them in this way but I couldn’t find any other handy single “all the pharaohs” csv file! ↩︎
Again somewhat surprisingly, it is not that easy to find a decent source for this on the internet. But here is a nice one in German that sets out how many layers of stone there are in the Great Pyramid of Giza ↩︎
I found this hard to believe so I went to back to my favourite academic source: wikipedia, where a list of the dynasties of Egypt shows that this is indeed the case, with the Ptolemaic dynasty clocking in at 275 years (a conservative number), vs the runner up 18th dynasty at 258 years long. ↩︎
Although I have to admit that this is pure postulation. ↩︎
In case you are wondering why we went straight from Ptolemy VI to Ptolemy VIII, this is because the person who was previously thought by academics to be Ptolemy VII turned out not to exist, but by the time they realised this they had already named Ptolemy VIII and it was too late to turn back. ↩︎
I also got the feeling that Wilkinson “one shotted” the description of the sacred precinct of Ptah in Memphis (now Cairo): “There were also special areas... in one enclosure grew a special tree under which sat a sacred baboon.” What was special about the tree? How did they identify the sacred baboon? And how did they get it to sit still? ↩︎

New history books in November 2025

2025-12-01T00:00:00Z

A slightly smaller selection of new history books from November 2025 (in the UK, in hardback) - nevertheless they are all welcome! The three I am looking out for are:

Mexico: A 500-Year History, by Paul Gillingham. Big thick national history books are always a bit of a gamble, but given that Mexico has such an interesting history this one may be worth it!
El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness, by Giles Tremlett. A key figure in modern European history but not someone I know much about, Franco (and the Franco period) is someone (something) I would like to understand better.
On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All, by Arnoud S. Q. Visser. The flipside of wisdom: I would hope for plenty of amusing anecdotes!

Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.

The full list:

📕 Eleanor: On the Trail of England's Lost Queen
📘 El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness
📔 The Hitler Years: Holocaust 1933-1945
📗 Greek To Us: The Fascinating Ancient Greek That Shapes Our World
📙 On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All
📓 Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed
📒 Little Kingdoms: An A-Z of Early Medieval Britain
📙 Master of Rome: A Life of Julius Caesar
📘 Mexico: A 500-Year History
📔 Children of Mars: The Origins of Rome's Empire

Classicism and Other Phobias - review

2025-11-16T00:00:00Z

Our review of Classicism and Other Phobias, by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, first published in July 2025.

A short book exploring the idea that Classics becoming Greek and Roman devalues other traditions by design, in particular black and indigenous traditions in North America.

While the subject is inherently interesting and important, the uber-academic prose is unfortunately all but impenetrable to the ordinary reader.

★☆☆☆☆

Classics is an odd subject with a long history.

(I will define Classics as the study of the Roman and Ancient Greek world, with an emphasis on the written-down remains)

To give you an idea of how long this subject has been taught: if you attended Oxford University in the UK in the late 13th century you would have studied Latin grammar, logic and rhetoric, which was called the trivium¹ and was kind of an early classics degree. If you attend Oxford University today you can choose between computer science, economics and management, modern history², a bunch of other stuff and... Classics.

What accounts for its staying power?

One answer is that a degree in Classics leaves you with a mastery of obscure languages, training on how to win an argument, and (often) an unhealthy enthusiasm for the masochistic toughness of the Spartans. In short it is ideal training to be a corporate lawyer, which has been the fate of a clear majority of the classicists I know from my time at university.

But clearly you don’t have to study Classics to become a corporate lawyer so there must be more to it.³

What makes a classic?

This is where Dan-El Padilla Peralta, classicist and author of the recently released Classicism and Other Phobias has some interesting perspectives. In his own words, he is interested in Classicism as:

the historical-material processes whereby some domains of human experience come to be identified and valued as classical.

Dan-El Padilla Peralta, Classicism and Other Phobias

He is intensely suspicious of the origins of Classics - ie the “historical-material processes” of Classicism - while hopeful that the subject of Classics in the future will confront those origins and then go on to constitute a much broader field of study than just the Greek and Roman stuff.⁴

What’s wrong with Classics?

Padilla Peralta holds that the problem with Greek and Roman stuff is that it has been tainted by centuries of European and North American racism. Why? Classics as a modern discipline was being formed alongside and at the same time as the Americas were taken over by Europeans, with the exploitation and exclusion of indigenous people and black Africans that this entailed. Classics was assembled by racists.

This is summed up in his introduction:

I will work from the proposition that the field of classics as a structure of institutionalised study originated within and has historically derived profit from racial capitalism.... I hold that there can be no effective and ethical method for recovering and studying the pluralisms of the past... without a corresponding political struggle to redistribute the material and psychic resources that have been piled up in the course of racial capitalism’s tentacular extension across the globe.

Dan-El Padilla Peralta, Classicism and Other Phobias

So the work of confronting racial injustice in the past is intimately connected with combating racial and social injustice in the present - Classics matters! Either as a perpetuator of a white normalising dominance, as the author may assert it currently is, or - if reformed - an important part of breaking down this hegemony.

Rearranging the bookshelf

Padilla Peralta hints at what a new classics might include, suggesting that “this classicism would claim Bwa Kayiman and the Haitian Revolution as its origin-story”

But don’t be fooled that you can just add a few extra books to your library and bin a couple of the old ones - the act of choosing the Classics library is itself a form of appropriation.

the problem is not resolvable simply through expansion of the overrepresented paradigm of classics “to include other classical traditions”: such moves simply reaffirm, if they do not actively incentivise, the discipline’s coloniser tendencies.

Dan-El Padilla Peralta, Classicism and Other Phobias

Next steps?

So where does this leave us? To be honest I’m not sure, and this is one of the things that made me struggle with the book. I have a reasonable idea of what Peralta Padilla finds objectionable in how classicism has worked to date, but a very unclear notion of what a new classicism / Classics might be.

Perhaps the reason for this is precisely because the author doesn’t want to provide all the answers, in order to leave space for others to share their own thoughts. But whatever the reason I was left wanting more.

What’s in the book?

The book is compact at about 140 pages, split into four chapters.

The first chapter explores how the classical notions of Northern Europeans spread to the Americas with the opening up of the Atlantic in the late 15th century and the role of the slave trade and slavery in tying Africans to this new world.
The second chapter considers the growing overrepresentation of Roman and Greek stuff (Classics) alongside the underrepresentation of the Haitian Revolution (contrasting this with the much better remembered French Revolution) to draw connections between the process of Classicism, anti-blackness and racial slavery.
The third chapter looks at the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and specifically his ‘blind spot’ when it comes to indigenous American people and how this is linked to classicism. Classicism is partly responsible for creating this blind spot because it places indigenous Americans outside history.
Finally the fourth chapter explores two artists Kehinde Wiley and Kara Walker who play with themes of black identity and classicism in their work.

What is it like to read?

Unfortunately this book is virtually impenetrable to a casual reader.

The prose is elegant in style but I found the substance very hard to extract. Even writing down what each chapter was about for this review was a challenge.

Partly I think this is because Padilla Peralta is more concerned with the academic reactions to the book than he is with the reactions of ordinary punters. So for example he will cite a huge range of scholars when picking his way through a topic. This is laudable but also frequently got in the way of me following a line of reasoning.

The frustrating thing about this is that I really want to understand - and would like other people to understand - the arguments the author is making and the debates he is referring to.

What I would love to see is a sequel to this book written with the airport reader in mind. Something like “What I love and hate about Classics, and the six things that need to change”.⁵ My thinking is that if you want to change the world, you will need to talk to the world.

What I most appreciated about the book

The best thing about this book for me - and also the effect of writing this review - was that it got me thinking in new directions.

For example Padilla Peralta talks about the label of Black Classicism, which is intended to be positive, but can imply that “normal” classicism is somehow non-black or anti-black - somehow denied to black people. Personally I don’t see classics / classicism in this way (i.e. implicitly white) but there are undoubtedly white people who do and worry that this classification is at risk - you only have to skim through the Amazon book reviews of any ancient history book to see a few examples.

This led me to the thought that it is curious that Classics / Classicism - imported to the New World by Europeans, and asserted to be a way of understanding and justifying their own dominance - is still considered to be marbled with this superiority complex. Therefore there is an association in the present day of Classics with inequality and racism.

But - and this bit is the actual thought - the Bible and Christianity, which were imported into America at the same time and are just as “white” as an ancient Greek, appear entirely untainted. Surely European Christianity is vastly more implicated in justifying exploitative behaviour than appeals to ancient Rome? What makes one part of the early modern European worldview suspect (Classicism) whereas this other more central part (Christianity) gets away scot free?

Conclusion

After reading this book I am satisfied that Padilla Peralta has a mastery of obscure language, would be excellent at winning arguments, and may or may not have an obsession with the Spartans (probably not).⁶

But he hasn’t translated these qualities into a book that an ordinary person can reasonably be expected to read and understand, despite the inherently interesting and important subject.

I gleaned this from A History of Merton College by G H Martin and JR Highfield, the full passage being: “The liberal arts comprised grammar, dialectic, commonly called logic, and rhetoric, which were together known as the trivium, and arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music, the four subjects which made up the quadrivium. In theory, and originally in practice, the skills which the trivium imparted - a sense of the significance of language, a capacity for analytical argument, and some knowledge of the arts of persuasion - were applied to the themes of the quadrivium to produce an educated mind.” It was surprisingly hard to deduce the history of the subject of Classics using a Google search. ↩︎
Modern in this context being the fall of the Roman empire onwards. ↩︎
As I am writing this review sitting on the tube on my way to work in London, the man standing directly in front of me is engrossed in Mythos by Stephen Fry. He is smartly dressed, in his forties or fifties with short and sparse black-grey hair and a stubbly beard. What does he hope to achieve by reading this book? Because it is the London underground in rush hour it would be an impossible breach of etiquette for me to ask. ↩︎
To be a bit more precise with definitions here. Classics is a subject you can study at university. Classicism is defined as the historical process of setting the curriculum for Classics. Ie Classics is the bucket and Classicism is the act of pouring in the contents. In theory you could pour anything into the bucket and then use the tools of Classics to study it carefully. The water is muddied a little because the contents of the bucket can itself be a tool sometimes, such as the (Greek?) tools of rhetoric and logic. ↩︎
I’m keen not to put people off so have used the word Classics instead of Classicism - few enough people know what the former is anyway. ↩︎
He is also good at podcasts. I found this podcast where he talks about his book a much better way to understand the book than actually reading it (for the avoidance of doubt I did read the book!). ↩︎

New history books in October 2025

2025-11-03T00:00:00Z

I didn't manage to grub up so many new history books from last month, but as ever there is more than enough to keep you reading! The three books I particularly liked the look of are:

Rhyme and Reason: A Short History of British Poetry, by Mark Forsyth. I am a big fan of history of course. I am also a big fan of poetry, even though I never actually read any (except the ones on the London underground). Anyway this book looks like a great way to kill two birds with one stone.
The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery, by Siddharth Kara. I have heard of this horrific case many times but have never read about it in any detail, this looks like the opportunity to do just that.
Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State, by Mahmood Mamdani. The first history book I have added to the database on Uganda. I suspect the story told here will not be a happy one unfortunately.

Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.

The full list:

📕 Daring to Be Free: Resistance and Rebellion in the Atlantic Slave World
📘 Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State
📔 The Two Hundred Years War: The Bloody Crowns of England and France, 1292-1492
📗 The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma
📙 Rhyme and Reason: A Short History of British Poetry
📓 The Surgeon, The Midwife, The Quack: How to Stay Alive in Renaissance England
📒 Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
📙 The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
📘 The Fateful Hour: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic

Reporting back from last month on the lack of word in the English language to convey the concept of 'a particular place at a particular time': I had thought that 'zeitpunkt' would be a good bet not least because it sounded quite cool. However my ex-German-translator sister tells me that this doesn't really carry any association with a point in space (just time), so that doesn't work so well. I am now leaning towards the word 'topochron' to do the job. I coined this word with the help of a conversation with google gemini, after rejecting chronotope as a word already in circulation.

What to Expect When You're Dead - review

2025-10-12T00:00:00Z

Our review of What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife, by Robert Garland, first published in April 2025.

Entertaining, witty, and engaging, this ‘tour of death’ is structured around a series of themes and questions such as ‘where to deposit the remains?’, ‘endocannibalism’, and ‘what if you come back to life as a frog?’.

If you’ve long been looking for answers to those questions, this is the place to find them!

★★★★☆

The Greek Historian Herodotus reports that the Egyptians carried a painted corpse made of wood inside a coffin into their drinking parties. The host then displayed the corpse to each of the guests in turn, saying. “Look at this as you drink and enjoy yourself. You’ll be like that when you die.”

Robert Garland, What to Expect When You're Dead

In fact, stories told by Herodotus make a frequent appearance in the book. He appears to have enjoyed a death-related anecdote – we also get the two brothers who died dragging their mum to a festival in an ox-cart (the oxen didn’t turn up in time) which apparently was a great way to die and made them the second most fortunate men to have ever lived;¹ and a Persian tribe called the Massagetae who killed, stewed, and ate their elderly when they got too old (described as “the most blessed way to die”).

What’s in (and not in) the book?

The book focuses on ancient Western and Near/Middle Eastern religions: Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Early Christian, and Islamic. The book also covers the evidence of the earliest beliefs and practices among Mesolithic and Neolithic communities. So, we get a broad chronological and geographic spectrum, from the fossil remains of 28 hominins found in a deposit called Sima de los Huesos (”Pit of Bones”) in north-central Spain dating from approximately 430,000 BC to Islamic funerary rituals laid out in fiqh literature, the earliest parts of which date to the eight century AD.

The author notes the belief systems not covered, which include most of those prevalent in East Asia (Confucian, Shinto, Buddhist) and pre-Conquest America (Aztec, Mayan).

A macabre smorgasbord

Having said that, the author enjoys drawing liberally from any and all analogies where he thinks it is interesting or entertaining to do so, including frequent references to what we do and do not do today with our dead.

At no point does the book attempt to justify or explain its own scope (either geographic or temporal). The author’s PhD thesis was turned into his first book ‘The Greek Way of Death’, so I expect he has just drawn on the topics he knows most about. The overall effect is a miscellany of amusing and entertaining anecdotes; this is the type of book you might want to buy someone as a fun birthday or Christmas present.

That is not to disparage the author’s erudition in any way – the book is a treasure trove of fascinating information, and I’m sure the author has published plenty of dry academic tomes in his day, but this book is clearly trying to achieve something slightly different.

What is the book like to read?

The book opens with the line ‘Studies prove that everybody dies eventually’ and a similarly dry/sardonic tone is prevalent throughout. Coupled with the author’s own overt scepticism and atheism, you get the impression that Professor Garland would enjoy sharing a drink with Chrisopher Hitchens (when he was alive) or Richard Dawkins whilst chuckling to themselves over the absurdities of human behaviour and beliefs.

At one point the author queries whether we can ‘seriously think that ancient people believed that the food that lay mouldering beside the tomb contained nutritional value for the dead’. Many will consider that a reasonable question to ask. But if that sounds like the type of thing that is likely to irritate and/or offend you, you may be advised to steer clear.

Is there anything I didn’t like about the book?

I had the feeling throughout that I would have got more out of the book had the author structured it chronologically or around specific religions. The structure chosen maximises the amusement/anecdotal qualities of the book, but I was left struggling to put together a coherent picture of what different religions thought about death, how those compared to one another, and how different ideas about death interacted with one another over time.

Ideas for dying well

The book was certainly thought-provoking. As I grow older and face my own inevitable doom, it inspired a number of observations about how to meet my end:

Die rich and/or powerful: the author points out that death was class conscious and what we know about it mostly concerns powerful men. The Egyptian belief in life after death appears to have started with the Pharaohs and then gradually worked its way down the social ladder over the millennia. What did slaves think happened to them when they died?
Avoid powerful enemies: if proper treatment of the dead was a preoccupation of ancient civilisations, then desecration of the dead was a great way to intimidate your enemies: for example, Assyrian King Sennacherib boasted that he “cut the throat of his enemies like lambs … made the contents of their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth … cut their testicles off and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers” etc. etc. (you get the impression). I’ll never look at a cucumber in the same way again.
Move to Egypt: (or somewhere else which is very dry): the Egyptians were especially obsessed with death and devoted enormous economic resources to it.² The author speculates whether this could be because the desert preserved bodies particularly well (and raises the irony that mummification just replicated what the desert did, but less effectively).³
Don’t count on immortality: where does the belief in life after death come from? The author argues that pre-historic humans would have almost always died prematurely which might have resulted in an assumption that a person could go on living indefinitely, provided they avoided being eaten by something bigger. I wasn’t entirely convinced by this argument – presumably some people did, occasionally, die of old age and someone would have noticed that?
Plan your last words: the Emperor Claudius, whose last words were reputedly “I think I’ve shat myself” should have been better prepared.
Likewise, think about a nice epitaph for your tomb: the Romans seem to have demonstrated a little more originality in this respect than is common today⁴ – Tiberius Claudius Secundus observed that “Baths, wine, and women bring about life’s decline. Yet what is life without baths, wine, and women”.
Ask your relatives/neighbours not to eat you (unless you’re into that kind of thing and/or it’s culturally appropriate).⁵
Avoid dying young in ancient Rome (I’ve already achieved that), where it was forbidden by law to mourn the death of a child under the age of three (for a child under the age of six, parents were restricted to one month of mourning).
Avoid being pronounced dead before you die (or actively engineer it, depending on your proclivities). There is the obvious risk that you might be buried/cremated alive. However, even if you avoided that fate, if you were found to be alive after being pronounced dead the likelihood is that you would have been treated with a great deal of suspicion and subjected to strange rituals – in ancient Greece, for example, you would be wrapped in swaddling bands and breast-fed, to symbolise your re-birth.

How far we’ve come

The author concludes his book with some wry observations about the current state of belief in the afterlife: he notes that 7 out of 10 Americans believe in the afterlife (a proportion that has been largely constant since the 1960s),⁶ including 20% of agnostics and 13% of atheists.⁷ Given the amount undertakers get away with charging, of which I have some unfortunate recent experience, we still put a great deal of weight on making sure that the dead are properly taken care of.

Conclusion

This is a fun read and an excellent source of anecdotes to bring out at the next party you attend. In fact, why not bring a wooden corpse with you and really liven things up?

Number one was an Athenian called Tellus, who was survived by his children and grandchildren, died fighting for Athens, and was given a public funeral. ↩︎
The author notes that the pharaohs spent more resources on constructing pyramids than on their temples, or anything else (the Great Pyramid was the tallest building on earth before the Industrial age) and has an interesting observation about how such monumentality reflects on the highly centralised and authoritarian nature of power in ancient Egypt. ↩︎
We are informed elsewhere in the book that mummification remains available today – a company called Summum offers the service for $67,000. If that sounds expensive, consider the plight of the Athenian Diogeiton, who was expected to spend 5,000 drachmas on his brother’s tomb (enough to feed a family of four at subsistence levels for five to seven years). ↩︎
Although I like the tomb in Highgate Cemetery which has the one-word inscription “DEAD”. ↩︎
The author cites the interesting story of Persian King Darius who tried to pay the Greeks to eat their dead and the Kallatiai not to eat their dead (each contrary to their respective customs). Each refused, regardless of the amount of money offered. Personally, I think I could be convinced. ↩︎
Based on a study by Cornell University in 2011. ↩︎
Based on a Pew poll taken in 2013. ↩︎

New history books in September 2025

2025-10-03T00:00:00Z

A focus on the history of Britain this month with half of the books peering back at the history of this island, and more precisely the English bit of it. The rest of the world is not totally neglected though, for example with a timely book on the US Constitution which I am glad to see is still a thing.

The three books from this month that I woud set either myself or my time-rich virtual doppleganger to read are:

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, by David Woodman. I've always been a fan of the Anglo-Saxon kings without ever knowing much about them - I'm sure distance makes the heart grow fonder! This one should reduce the gap.
The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, by Lyse Doucet. Has the feel of a 'journalist's history book', but that said I think using the hotel as a way to bring together all sorts of people is a compelling way to tell the story of the (presumably) recent past in Afghanistan.
A Scandal in Königsberg, by Christopher Clark. And finally one which I have actually read and so can reliably comment on! A short sweet and superb book, using the story of an actually-not-that-turbulent priest to illuminate a zeitpunkt.¹ My review of Scandal in Konigsberg.

Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.

The full list:

📙 A Scandal in Königsberg
📕 The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan
📘 Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016
📔 The Stolen Crown: Treachery, Deceit and the Death of the Tudor Dynasty
📗 A History of England in 25 Poems
📙 The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain
📓 Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe
📒 The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom
📙 On Antisemitism: A Word in History
📘 Revolting: A Riotous History of the World
📔 Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower
📗 We the People: A History of the US Constitution
📕 Queer Georgians: A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers and Homemakers
📘 The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War
📔 Crucible of Light: Islam and the forging of Europe from the 8th to the 21st Century
📗 Warrior Monks: Politics and Power in Medieval Britain

The English language doesn't seem to have good word to convey the concept of 'a particular place at a particular time' - in this case mid 19th Century Konigsberg. On the assumption that if AI is good at anything it should be good at this, I used google Gemini to isolate the German word zeitpunkt as the best candidate for a loanword. I will check with my sister who is an ex German translator (thanks in part to AI...) as to the appropriateness of this word and report back! ↩︎

Scandal in Konigsberg - review

2025-09-26T00:00:00Z

Our review of Scandal in Konigsberg, by Christopher Clark, first published in September 2025.

A micro history focusing on the scandal of a priest - Johann Ebel - who is unjustly accused of outrageous sexual misdemeanours in mid 19th Century Konigsberg.

Like all great micro histories it is a little window that opens up a broader view on a particular time and place.

★★★★★

How best to attract your attention? Tales of sexual debauchery: a priest encouraging his flock to disrobe and cavort about in the nude? Or perverse initiation rites involving brain-washed aristocratic daughters? - two of whom reportedly died of fatally high levels of sexual arousal. All underpinned by a bizarre cosmology involving two primordial eggs whose coupling forged reality as we know it.

What works to capture attention today worked just as well in early 19th century East Prussia, as Christopher Clark investigates in Scandal in Konigsberg.¹

The scandal centred around two priests² Johann Ebel and Heinrich Diestel who were accused of the aforementioned misdemeanors in 1835.

The truth of the matter is laid bare by the Clark who convincingly clears them of all charges (except for the primordial eggs). In fact the evidence suggests they were kind, selfless, pious men, who were dedicated to serving their communities.

Just how they came to be accused and then pronounced guilty is carefully examined in this parsimonious and beautifully packaged narrative.

The context for their prosecution is explained by Clark:

In the early nineteenth century, religion passed like a spiritual power surge across Europe, threatening on occasion to burn out the grid... the revolutionary era had shaken religion partly loose from the institutions of theological and ecclesiastical authority, allowing it to flow out into the world.

Christopher Clark, Scandal in Konigsberg

In this febrile environment small - or indeed imagined - issues could readily become magnified into larger matters of principle. Ebel and Diestel, the two priests, had unwittingly found themselves caught up in a culture war.

It is not too difficult to draw parallels with our own time. Or as Clark coyly puts it in the preface: “Resemblances to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.”

A micro history

This book is a micro history focusing on the scandal, and the priest Ebel in particular. Like all great micro histories it is a little window that opens up a broader view on a particular time and place.

The view from this window is not long after the Napoleonic Wars, where the French Grand Armée had passed in triumph on its way to Russia (and had made itself hated by stealing food and livestock) and had passed back in miserable defeat, closely followed by the Russian army.

It is where the eminent philosopher Emmanuel Kant had walked up and down, contriving his tortuous ethical theories.

And it is the location and origin of the famous “bridges” problem in mathematics that I remember studying in school about two hundred years later: with seven bridges over the river, can you walk around the town crossing each bridge only once?³.

The time is one of religious upheaval. The French revolution has undermined established religion, and in an age of “rational thought” even some of Ebel’s fellow priests at priest school seem to consider belief in a biblical God optional and a bit old fashioned.

It is also a time of emerging mass media, with wide newspaper circulation and journalists fully prepared to jump into the gutter to increase it even further.

Clark deftly sketches this background - I got a strong and convincing sense of place when reading the book.

The foreground though is the character of and reactions to Johann Ebel, and Clark succeeds brilliantly in bringing him to life as a sympathetic figure.

Style guide

Scandal in Konigsberg is delightfully easy to read. It is a short book at 190 pages, but doesn’t skimp on any of the (sometimes juicy) details. For any Kurt Vonnegut fans out there... it is a bit like reading a Kurt Vonnegut novel, where, despite the lightness of the prose, every word carries weight.

My enthusiasm may partly be as a result of reading this straight after the monolithic and rather heavy going The Celts: A Modern History, but be that as it may, I feel like this is a great model for how to write a popular history book!

Downsides?

Honestly none, unless you come with a pre-existing and intense dislike of early 19th century German history.

Conclusion

It is a pleasant symmetry that while it is the lurid and sexually charged accusations that draw our attention to this story - just as Ebel and Diestel’s detractors had wanted - the story itself highlights their admirable qualities, memorialising them sympathetically as virtuous men when they would otherwise have faded into obscurity. A great book.

Now called Kaliningrad and part of Russian territory. It is oddly disconnected from the rest of Russia. ↩︎
Or possibly preachers? Or pastors? Does it matter? ↩︎
You can’t. ↩︎

New history books in August 2025

2025-09-11T00:00:00Z

This seems to be a month of big ideas, judging by the new history books (in the UK, hardback). Many are spanning the whole of human history, and the entirelty of the world. There are a few different angles: childbirth, rivers (x2), the economic force of women, sensory experience. Also a couple on "big men" of history, including two of the biggest: Winston Churchill and de Gaulle.

Anyway, here are three that I may delve into more deeply, time permitting...

Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations, by Sam Kean. This one looks fun, and I'm curious to know how the sounds can be recreated. Maybe it means musical instruments?
Seven Rivers: A Journey Through the Currents of Human History, by Vanessa Taylor. I like the idea of a comparative history that looks at the beginnings of urbanisation across difference river systems, untangling what it was that drove similar patterns of human behaviour at similar times. This probably isn't that book, but it may touch upon it.
Domination: The fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity, by Alice Roberts. Having read a Guardian newspaper review of Domination already, this feels like a stepping stone on Roberts' path to become the next Dawkins, if she has not achieved this already. My suspicion is it will be frequently provocative, often unfair, and sell nicely!

Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.

The full list:

📕 Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-Creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations
📘 Seven Rivers: A Journey Through the Currents of Human History
📔 Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem: Frontier Inventiveness in the Age of the Crusades
📗 Domination: The fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity
📙 Artists of History: Churchill and de Gaulle - the Last Titans
📓 King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East
📒 The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI and I
📙 Carthage: A new history of an ancient empire
📘 Three Rivers: The Hidden Histories of the Waterways That Made Europe
📔 Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea
📗 Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power
📕 Born: A History of Childbirth