A smaller range of new history books this month, perhaps the fewest since my records began!1 Not that there will be time to read them all anyway of course...
Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon for those who like to buy their books there.
Here are a few that caught my attention:
- The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain took one small boy and hundreds of treasures from Ethiopia by Andrew Heavens - This is the first popular history book covering Ethiopia that I have seen since I started keeping track.2 It tells the story of how the six-year-old Prince of Ethiopia Alamayu was taken to England by the British at the end of the 19th Century as a 'guest' (i.e. hostage) following their invasion of the country.
- Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain by Stuart Ward - I'm interested in this one partly because I haven't read much contemporary history recently, and it is a subject that I am pretty ignorant of.
- Women and the Crusades by Helen J. Nicholson - this looks like an in-depth and expert survey of a perennially popular topic - and should shed light from a slightly different angle.
- The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe by Kate Strasdin - covering the fascinating 'fabric diary' of a well-travelled 19th Century British lady. It looks like a great way into the wider world at that time but also into the more intimate life of the diarist.
