Reviews

New Heights

Admiring the world’s most famous ceiling.

Benito Mussolini, during the march on Rome, with some of the quadruplets: from left Emilio De Bono, Italo Balbo and Cesare Maria De Vecchi.

Shut Up and Eat!

Does silence endure in Italy over Mussolini’s murderous regime?

Liar Liar

The courtroom drama, executions, and street pageantry of the so-called ‘Popish Plot’.

No More Windfalls

Uprisings, strikes, protests and massacres in South Africa, from the Boer War to the present day.

The BOCHK Bank of China Building under construction viewed from the Peak

‘Contradiction on Stilts’

A uniquely personal take on the transfer of power in Hong Kong.

Assassin’s Creed

Was the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson the ‘murder that triggered the Irish Civil War’?

A fragment of text inscribed on the Mesha Stele, c.840 BC. Louvre/Wiki Commons.

‘Inventing the Alphabet’ by Johanna Drucker review

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker explores the birth of the alphabet before the Greeks.

Poster showing the ‘Birth of the Soviets and the Different Organs of Soviet Power’, c. 1920.

Survival of the Least Fit

Is there a trend of ‘reverse Darwinism’ in Russian history?

Vietnamese soldiers during the First Indochina War.

Total War

The means, tactics and strategies employed by Vietnamese communist authorities against the occupying French.

view of the Italian peninsula looking south from the Alps, 19th century.

‘History of the Adriatic’ by Egidio Ivetic review

History of the Adriatic: A Sea and its Civilization by Egidio Ivetic explores the Mediterranean within the Mediterranean as a single historical space.