Reviews

If you are in Edinburgh during the Festival be sure to visit the National Gallery’s new Lavery on Location exhibition – a well-curated tour de force of the works of Sir John Lavery, the Irish Impressionist who carved out a distinguished career for himself and became one of Britain’

Professor Richard Overy asserts in the preface that his book is "an impertinence". He concedes that because of his narrow expertise, "the world’s wars waged during the 1930s and 1940s". That important area is in contrast to the many thousands of years covered in the book most of which are beyo

On 18 September 1961, a plane transporting Dag Hammarskjöld, then the secretary-general of the United Nations, flew across the Congo on a long route to avoid a vast area that had seceded from the main part of the country. The fatal flight ended at Ndola in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasala

How do you present a biography of a person in a different age who travelled the world and attained great fame? Any such subject would test even an experienced writer and Sir Roger Casement more so. All due deference ought to be shown to this study of the life of Roger Casement, not least because, on

The trial in question, of Bruno Dey, opened in Hamburg on 17 October 2019. Dey was charged with his role within the Holocaust. It was alleged that he was involved as an accessory (compared to a perpetrator which is the distinction on which the book focuses) in the murder of 5,230 inmates at Stutthof

In cinematic style, this study launches with a prologue describing a major speech of Lloyd George shortly after the outbreak of the Great War. That great event seems to have epitomised the expedient rallying call by the master of the genre in an unexpected war, or at least a war at an unexpected poi

A simple question: do leaders make history, or does history make leaders? Seeking an answer formed the basis of a course by the author on leaders and leadership in history at Harvard University. The debate in understanding leadership is said to be deciding between those (like Machiavelli) who believ

The Cleveland Torso Murderer, also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, was an unidentified serial killer who was active in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1930s. In parenthesis, it should be acknowledged immediately that these sorts of designations assume that there is one responsible person but that

As controversy rages over the reinstatement of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art, this timely and thoroughly researched book makes an eloquent plea for the restoration of what was a jewel in Scotland's artistic and cultural crown. The Mack was considered to be the great masterpiece o

It is rather sad that the manuscript for this book was completed by its author, Maurice Watkins, a solicitor to and director of Manchester United, shortly before his death in 2021. His relatives and others have assisted with the work to ensure publication. Commendably, profits from the book go towar

Approaching the subject of the personal relations between the monarch and the prime ministers must surely have been somewhat daunting given the longevity of the reign of Queen Victoria. Many of the individual prime ministers are themselves the subject of an extensive literature by specialist histori

This book, part of the series “Studies in International & Comparative Criminal Law”, contains 17 essays, by authors, both national and international in honour of Ralph Henham, who for many years was on the staff of Nottingham Trent University and was a professor there from 1998 until

Another ‘trial of the century’ book! This one is a narrative account of events leading up to the 1877 prosecution of a feminist free-thinker, Annie Besant, together with her friend, the activist and liberal politician Charles Bradlaugh. They had arranged for the publication of Charles Kn

Douglas Cusine is impressed by a 'first-class', enlightening and readable account by a child protection lawyer of an under-resourced and neglected area of the law.

Robert Shiels commends an important new book on the Dreyfus case which exposed the anti-semitism in French society that would eventually find expression in the Vichy regime and the obscenity of French police rounding up Jews to be sent to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. Maurice Samuels, a