History

Colourful travellers’ accounts move the start date for a rite of passage, discovers Claire Jowitt

The conflict takes a backseat to questions about the state of ideological and cultural thinking, says Angela K. Smith

Clive Bloom praises an admirable introduction to the magical and political connections of a controversial figure

Mercedes Camino on a cultural analysis spanning seven decades

Eva Shan Chou lauds an original, erudite portrait of a writer whose courage matched her creativity

Gary Day on an exploration of new technologies’ effects on artists’ representation of the world

Ronald Hutton praises a tour de force on the causes of the English Civil War

Marilyn Young on the development of human rights as an important issue in the US

Jonathan Mirsky on a selective view of the Chinese political elite

Jonathan Mirsky on a merciless dissection of a seemingly unstoppable country

A. W. Purdue on the changing social lives of the aristocracy and gentry between the wars

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman on the give and take between the two superpowers since the Soviet collapse

Gregory Kent explores the affective consequences of war

A. W. Purdue on how children shared in the nation’s experience of the First World War

Post-war history from East and West perspectives creates vivid impressions for Roger Morgan

Beset by turmoil, an inimitable critic wrote as if from the future. Joanna Hodge on a material force

Peter Gwyn finds an attempt to put More’s writings into historical context less than clear

Violence, accident and luck have all made this young federal union, says Donald MacRaild

Sheila Rowbotham on a great writer whose contrary aspects are impossible to sum up

Willy Maley on one of the most important works in the English language

Lara Cook on coping with the man of steel’s legacy

Nazi ideology may not have adopted evolutionary theory wholesale, but it certainly used its ideas, says Yvonne Sherratt

Richard J. Evans considers the comfort of the counterfactual

With the stage set for passionate religious argument, Helen Smith takes her seat

Robert Eaglestone on an attempt to capture barbarism in poetry, not prose

William Poole enjoys the insights but prefers his prose less florid

Jonathan Mirsky on the politics and economics of the relationship between rapidly developing China and stagnating Japan

Philip Hoare on the global market’s manifest destiny

It was Civil War not Fenianism that prompted Anglo-American tensions, argues Donald M. MacRaild

Sarah Semple on the ritual and romance of this island story’s early chapters

A thread of celebrity weaves through a masterful study of cults of Christian icons, Helen Fulton finds

Grace Lees-Maffei on the sights and sounds of the suburbs

Richard Bosworth on an exploration of Pound’s activism before and during the Second World War

Michael Patrick Cullinane on the military-academic complex

Harriet Harriss on an age when ‘form followed fealty’ and politics triumphed over economics

Alison Oram on changing attitudes to sexual perversions

Clare Brant revels in a compelling evocation of non-conformists in the capital’s cultural ‘heart’

Tom Wright on a study of how three late 19th century writers contemplated humanity’s impact on the environment

A. W. Purdue on the risky belief that participatory government can always muddle through any crisis

Sarah Sarzynski on an analysis of student activism during Brazil’s military dictatorship

Biancamaria Fontana on a mannered criticism of Enlightenment thought

June Purvis discusses conservative contributions to gender equality

Sally Feldman on an alternative interpretation of the media reporting and government responses to the Ethiopian famine in 1984

Lara Cook on how different leaders have made and remade the Kremlin

Alex Danchev on how Britain has remembered and misremembered the First World War

Caroline Osella on a page-turning survey of people and politics in a region once at the heart of global trade and imperial histories

Peter Messent on why upper-class men felt at home on the frontier

Roger Morgan on the reasons why so much blood was shed

Philip Kemp on the cooperation and acquiescence demonstrated by LA film studios to the Nazis

Ursula King on how the new Christian message was communicated by listening to the spoken word through teaching and preaching

Jennifer Altehenger on a compelling account of the Communist involvement in the Civil War and of the first eight years of Communist rule

The University of Birmingham is returning to New Zealand its collection of Toi moko, tattooed heads preserved by Maoris to venerate a loved one or mock a defeated enemy.

A. W. Purdue is moved by the stories of the medical personnel who saved lives at the Western Front

Helen Fulton looks at social attitudes to women’s monthly cycle in the 16th to 18th centuries

Joanna Bourke on a meticulous analysis of the responses of civil rights movements to sexual violence against women and girls

Pat Thane on a book that provides important insights into the experience of female immigrants

A. W. Purdue on the leader who saw the nuclear future but let it slip

Clare Brant on the truly dedicated followers of 18th-century fashion

Marianne Elliott on the bloody foundation of a modern state

Jill Stephenson praises a study of terror from the skies