Genre: History

Review – 100 Dresses

Posted September 7, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – 100 Dresses

100 Dresses

by The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Genres: Fashion, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 232
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

An irresistible look into more than 300 years of fashion through an exquisite collection of designer dresses

What woman can resist imagining herself in a beautiful designer dress? Here, for the first time ever, are 100 fabulous gowns from the permanent collection of the renowned Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, each of which is a reminder of the ways fashion reflects the broader culture that created it.

Featuring designs by Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel, Madame Gr s, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianni Versace, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, and many others, this one-of-a-kind collection presents a stunning variety of garments. Ranging from the buttoned-up gowns of the late 17th century to the cutting-edge designs of the early 21st, the dresses reflect the sensibilities and excesses of each era while providing a vivid picture of how styles have changed--sometimes radically--over the years. A late 1600s wool dress with a surprising splash of silver thread; a large-bustled red satin dress from the 1800s; a short, shimmery 1920s dancing dress; a glamorous 1950s cocktail dress; and a 1960s minidress--each tells a story about its period and serves as a testament to the enduring ingenuity of the fashion designer's art.

Images of the dresses are accompanied by informative text and enhanced by close-up details as well as runway photos, fashion plates, works of art, and portraits of designers. A glossary of related terms is also included.

100 Dresses is a very shallow overview of some of the dresses held by The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as such is obviously a very narrow selection. It’s heavy on some individual designers (like Dior) and surprisingly light on others (Vionnet), and it’s not like there’s a lot of details about any given dress or designer, but it’s still a fun quick read.

Despite the short blurbs for each dress, there are some fascinating details — I particularly boggled at the dress with probably hundreds of pleats, pressed rather than stitched into place, which would need to be returned to the designer for the pleats to be re-set if it got damp or just crushed with wear.

Not exactly a groundbreaking volume, but enjoyable.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – The Paper Chase

Posted September 5, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – The Paper Chase

The Paper Chase: The Printer, The Spymaster & The Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers

by Joseph Hone

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 272
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In the summer of 1705, a masked woman knocked on the door of David Edwards’s London workshop. She did not leave her name, only a package and a coded means of identifying her courier.

Edwards was a Welsh printer working in the dark confines of Nevill’s Alley, outside the city walls. The package was an illegal, anonymous pamphlet: The Memorial of the Church of England. The argument it proposed threatened to topple the government, but sedition sold well in the coffeehouses of Fleet Street and the woman promised protection. Edwards swiftly set about printing and surreptitiously distributing the pamphlet.

Parliament was soon in turmoil and government minister Robert Harley launched a hunt for all those involved. When Edwards was nowhere to be found, his wife was imprisoned and the pamphlet was burnt in his place. The printer was not the only villain, though, and Harley had to find the unknown writers who wished to bring the government down.

Full of original research, The Paper Chase tears through the backstreets of London and its corridors of power as Edwards’s allegiances waver and Harley’s grasp on parliament threatens to slip. Amateur detectives and government spies race to unmask the secrets of the age in this complex break-neck political adventure. Joseph Hone shows us a nation in crisis through the fascinating story of a single incendiary document.

Joseph Hone’s The Paper Chase: The Printer, The Spymaster, and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers digs into the publication and censorship of a very particular pamphlet published in 1705 by a Welsh printer working in London, David Edwards. It’s actually available online via the Open Library, if you’re curious to get a look at it.

Joseph Hone paints a vivid picture of the world of illicit printing and its dangers through the reception of the Memorial, and David Edwards’ run from the law. Much of the book focuses on the government minister, Robert Harley, and his attempts to find and punish the authors of the Memorial; this somewhat makes sense as a choice because the best evidence is what Harley had in his hands, with the true authors of the Memorial probably eventually correctly identified, but not through books and papers of their own. (At least, if they exist then Hone doesn’t discuss them at all.)

On the other hand, it means that the narrative is pretty much on Robert Harley’s side — the side of censorship. It does sympathise somewhat with Edwards, whose life and livelihood were threatened while the influential writers of the pamphlet hid (after assuring him of their protection when he agreed to print it for them)… but mostly it follows Harley’s efforts to track down the perpetrators. The tone is anti-Whig, pro-Tory, pro-censorship, I think; perhaps that was somewhat forced upon the author by the angle he used to get at the whole thing and examine evidence, but… Hmm. In general, the heavily fictionalised narrative lends itself to all manner of bias.

In addition, it’s a little awkward to follow up on everything, because although there are notes, the book lacks numbered footnotes, and the bibliography is in the form of a bibliographic essay. I admit, I didn’t dig into that at all, other than looking up the Memorial for myself and a couple of historical facts.

It’s not all negative or ambivalent; I found the first half a little slow, as I tried to get my head around the period (which I don’t know very well), but the second half was pretty good. Mary Edwards (the printers’ wife) seemed pretty awesome, a determined investigator and advocate for her husband, though I wish there’d been more to know about the other women in the case (the woman in the vizard mask who took the material to David Edwards’ press to print, or the servant who was with her). It can be difficult to tell the fiction from the fact, but it was still an interesting read, bearing that in mind.

I’m a bit torn on how to rate it, so definitely bear in mind my caveats.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective

Posted September 2, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective

The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective

by Sara Lodge

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 384
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation

From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves.

Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike.

How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge’s book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.

I found Sara Lodge’s The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective really interesting. It’s worth knowing right up front that Lodge isn’t necessarily talking about police-appointed official detectives, or even private detectives in their own rights: sometimes they’re police matrons, bystanders, the wives of policemen, etc. She argues that they were all part of an understanding in the period that women were working as detectives, despite it being viewed as a largely masculine profession.

Lodge discusses lots of examples, both factual and fictional, to build up the picture of how female detective work was understood in the Victorian era — mostly in the UK, but a little bit in the US, since there was some cross-pollination there. It’s all pretty fascinating to me, as someone who’s studied a little bit about the development of crime/mystery fiction as a genre, and maintained an interest in reading a lot of classics. I wonder if the British Library Crime Classics might pick up some of the older female detective stories Lodge discusses…

The book has detailed, numbered footnotes, a selected bibliography, and an index, which is always appreciated.

Overall, I found it very worth it, though I wish it’d dug a bit more into the genderbending and identity stuff that some female detectives played with. It feels like we only saw a tiny glimpse of that, mostly in the context of the stage, but that whet my appetite for more!

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World

Posted August 28, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World

A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World

by González Macías

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 150
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

There is something beautiful and wild in the impossible architecture of lighthouses. They have been the homes and workplaces of men and women whose romantic guardianship has saved countless lives from cruel seas. Yet while that way of life fades away, as the lights go out and the buildings crumble, we still have their stories.

From a blind lighthouse keeper tending a light in the Arctic Circle, to an intrepid young girl saving ships from wreck at the foot of her father's lighthouse, and the plight of the lighthouse crew cut off from society for forty days, this is a glorious book full of illuminating stories that will transport the reader to the world's most isolated and inspiring lighthouses.

With over thirty tales that explore the depths to which we can sink and the heights to which we can soar as human beings, and accompanied by beautiful illustrations, nautical charts, maps, architectural plans and curious facts, A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World is as full of wonder as the far flung lighthouses themselves.

Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn.

González MacĂ­as’ A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World was a very random pick from the library, inspired by Postcrossing’s first ever postcard, PT-1, and the semi-frequent requests from other members for postcards of lighthouses. The book covers ~35 lighthouses, recounting some of their histories and sources, and locating them on the map.

It’s a fun little history, albeit very light and including stuff like ghost stories with dubious levels of sourcing. Fact and fiction can be hard to tell apart in that context. Sometimes it describes photos without including them, too, which is a bit annoying — I’d love to have seen them.

Still, pretty interesting as a surprise light read!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Beneath Our Feet

Posted August 21, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Beneath Our Feet

Beneath Our Feet

by Michael Lewis, Ian Richardson

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 240
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Britain has a rich past, with incredible archaeology. Every day, new discoveries transform our understanding of its history. Most are made not by professional archaeologists, but by ordinary members of the public. Some are chance finds; others are recovered by the thousands of fieldwalkers, mudlarks, and metal detectorists who scour Britain's countryside and waterways looking for artifacts and coins.

Beneath Our Feet is a celebration of this growing public involvement in archaeology, and of the groundbreaking work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme managed by the British Museum in England and Amgueddfa Cymru in Wales. Its mission is collaboration with public finders, encouraging them to report their discoveries so they can be recorded on a national database and shared with archaeologists, historians, and everyone with an interest in the past buried beneath our feet.

From the 3,500-year-old Ringlemere Cup to the Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard, a heart pendant connected to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and a jar of American gold coins buried by a Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis, these are the stories of more than fifty astonishing treasures, the people who found them, and how they are reshaping British history.

Beneath Our Feet is by Michael Lewis and Ian Richardson, but it covers the finds of many ordinary people — not archaeologists, but metal detectorists, fieldwalkers, mudlarks, and people who just chanced across their finds. In the UK there’s a system to get such things declared and recorded in order that museums can acquire them for display and study, which is great, and here the authors show off some of these items.

It’s a fully illustrated book with colourful, non-glossy pages, some of which are the items themselves and some just images that cast some light on them. I could’ve done with more sense of scale on some of the items, but for a few they do show the scale and the comparisons. Each object or set of objects gets discussed quite briefly, within a couple of pages, and a note about where it can be found now (e.g. a museum or a private collection), so it’s more of a taster than anything.

I really liked it — as a kid who grew up watching and loving Time Team, this kind of “everyday archaeology” (though some of the objects found are in fact officially Treasure and incredibly opulent) is incredibly fun to read about. And it’s a really well-presented book.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Underwear: Fashion in Detail

Posted August 16, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Underwear: Fashion in Detail

Underwear: Fashion in Detail

by Eleri Lynn

Genres: Fashion, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 224
Series: Fashion in Detail
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Get intimately acquainted with the V&A's world-renowned collection of undergarments in this eye-opening visual history. From camisoles to corsets, basques to boudoir caps, Underwear: Fashion in Detail traces the peculiar evolution of underwear. Revealing photographs highlight close-up details in the garments, while intricate line drawings show their masterly construction. A wide range of designs is represented, from rare 16th-century examples to Dior's curvaceous New Look, to Calvin Klein's notorious briefs.

Underwear: Fashion in Detail is another of the books from the V&A delving into a particular topic through their collections, this one written by Eleri Lynn. I found it a little less easy to read than the others, with text arranged in columns rather than going smoothly across the page, and it doesn’t provide full images of many of the items discussed. Just seeing the detail without seeing how it fits into the whole is pretty unedifying, to be honest.

There’s a lot of information here, and someone with a better visual imagination might find it more useful for envisaging the whole thing, but I was a bit disappointed in the presentation.

Still, if it’s a topic you have interest in, it’s worth it!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – The Medieval Scriptorium

Posted August 8, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Medieval Scriptorium

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

by Sara J. Charles

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 352
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Illuminated with illustrations, an exploration of medieval manuscript production that offers insight into both the early history of the book and life in the Middle Ages.

This book takes the reader on an immersive journey through medieval manuscript production in the Latin Christian world. Each chapter opens with a lively vignette by a medieval narrator—including a parchment maker, scribe, and illuminator—introducing various aspects of manuscript production. Sara J. Charles poses the question “What actually is a scriptorium?” and explores the development of the medieval scriptorium from its early Christian beginnings through to its eventual decline and the growth of the printing press.

With the written word at the very heart of the Christian monastic movement, we see the immense amount of labor, planning, and networks needed to produce each manuscript. By tapping into these processes and procedures, The Medieval Scriptorium helps us to experience medieval life through the lens of a manuscript maker.

Sara J. Charles’ The Medieval Scriptorium is an in-depth look at book production in the Middle Ages — and not just the writing of books in a scriptorium, but also the process of making the parchment and bindings, the ink, the pigments, doing the illuminations. The most surprising fact for me was that actually, we don’t really know what “a scriptorium” was like, and we’re not even sure they existed: the evidence suggests they probably weren’t universal, at the very least, and that instead probably in many institutions the work was done in special cubicles in the cloisters.

Each chapter opens with a bit of fiction, which I found a bit unnecessary: they do meticulously demonstrate the conclusions of each chapter, bringing them to life, and I think some readers might like them a lot, I just… prefer my non-fiction to be non-fiction.

I’d say most of the information here wasn’t surprising to me, but there are some corners where I had never read about it in so much detail before, a few facts here and there that came as surprises. It’s a nicely presented book, with in-line colour illustrations (I seem to be seeing this more lately, which is welcome), detailed references (hurrah!) and an index. The facts line up with what I know from studying English lit, so all in all, recommended!

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – 18th-Century Fashion in Detail

Posted August 3, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 8 Comments

Review – 18th-Century Fashion in Detail

18th-Century Fashion in Detail

by Susan North

Genres: Fashion, History
Pages: 224
Series: Fashion in Detail
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

This beautifully illustrated book reveals sharp pleats, high collars, gleaming pastes, colorful beads, elaborate buttons, and intricate lacework that make up some of the garments in the Victoria and Albert Museum's extensive fashion collection. With an authoritative text, exquisite color photography of garment details, and line drawings and photographs showing the complete construction of each piece, the reader has the unique opportunity to examine up close historical clothing that is often too fragile to be on display. It is an inspirational resource for students, collectors, designers, and anyone who is fascinated by fashion and costume.

The V&A’s 18th-Century Fashion in Detail is written by Susan North, and it’s a beautiful item, with glossy full-colour images of details from the garments discussed. My main quibble is that it doesn’t provide full images of how the garments looked as a whole, rather breaking them down into one bit that the author has chosen to discuss, like just a close-up of some embroidery. There are sketches showing the garments and how they’re put together, but it’s not really the same.

It’s still a fascinating read, especially when it discusses some of the unfinished garments that were sold part-completed, so they could be fitted to the wearer. There’s almost nothing about children’s clothes, which made me curious — I think in this period they were still usually mini-versions of the adult clothing, but I’d still like to see some examples.

It’s a lovely volume, despite the caveats.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – The Buried City

Posted July 30, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Buried City

The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii

by Gabriel Zuchtriegel

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 256
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

This is Pompeii, as you've never seen it before.

In this revelatory history, Gabriel Zuchtriegel shares the new secrets of Pompeii. Over the last few years, a vast stretch of the city has been excavated for the first time. Now, drawing on these astonishing discoveries, The Buried City reveals the untold human stories that are at last emerging.

Pompeii is a world frozen in time. There are unmade beds, dishes left drying, tools abandoned by workmen, bodies embracing with love and fear. And alongside the remnants of everyday life, there are captivating works of art: lifelike portraits, exquisite frescos and mosaics, and the extraordinary sculpture of a sleeping boy, curled up under a blanket that's too small.

The Buried City reconstructs the catastrophe that destroyed Pompeii on 24 August 79 CE, but it also offers a behind-the-scenes tour of the city as it was before: who lived here, what mattered to them, and what happened in their final hours. It offers us a vivid sense of Pompeii's continuing relevance, and proves that ancient history is much closer to us than we think.

The cover copy on the inside flap of the dust cover suggests that Gabriel Zuchtriegel’s The Buried City is about amazing new finds at Pompeii, but that’s not really a good description of the book (though it does discuss some recent finds). It feels more like a manifesto for seeing Pompeii differently, for seeing it not just as a source of treasure, nor a tourist site for income, but a piece of heritage that everyone has a stake in, and everyone deserves the chance to learn about.

It takes a while to unfold to anything like that, though, because it’s also partly autobiographical, Zuchtriegel’s musings on what makes him who he is as an archaeologist, what drove him to the point that he became the director general at Pompeii. All of that led him to his excitement on unveiling the life of slaves in Pompeii, his attitude toward his work there, his involvement of young people in actually putting on drama in Pompeii — something which was revelatory for them and for the team involved.

It’s a fascinating book about archaeology in general, not just Pompeii; I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for being about Pompeii, but more as a view of a career and an attitude that culminated in a change of focus at Pompeii. And it really does ramble, sometimes.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Heavenly Bodies

Posted July 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Heavenly Bodies

Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs

by Paul Koudounaris

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 189
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

In 1578 news came of the discovery in Rome of a labyrinth of underground tombs, which were thought to hold the remains of thousands of early Christian martyrs. Skeletons of these supposed saints were subsequently sent to Catholic churches and religious houses in German-speaking Europe to replace holy relics that had been destroyed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The skeletons, known as "the catacomb saints," were carefully reassembled, richly dressed in fantastic costumes, wigs, crowns, jewels, and armor, and posed in elaborate displays inside churches and shrines as reminders to the faithful of the heavenly treasures that awaited them after death.

Paul Koudounaris gained unprecedented access to religious institutions to reveal these fascinating historical artifacts. Hidden for over a century as Western attitudes toward both the worship of holy relics and death itself changed, some of these ornamented skeletons appear in publication here for the first time.

Paul Koudounaris’ Heavenly Bodies is a really amazing book discussing the “catacomb saints”, whose skeletons were found in catacombs in Rome. To be accurate, the skeletons called the “catacomb saints” came from Roman cemeteries that contained largely early Christians, although some Jewish and other non-Christian Roman people were buried there too, those that preferred inhumation. The book discusses their provenance in some detail, and how the ones sent to European churches as “saints” were chosen, based on markers that were considered to suggest they were martyrs.

Obviously, as a modern reader who isn’t part of similar traditions, it all seems so weird — the exhumation and “translation” of these “martyrs”, the random selection, and then of course, the decoration that was heaped upon them, wound around their bones and sewn into their clothes and stitched over their eyes and noses and mouths. The book is fully illustrated by colour photographs of various surviving examples, and it’s both macabre and gorgeous.

I’m not sure how many images are in the book, but it’s a lot. The text is fascinating too, delving into what these “saints” meant to people, touching on some of the people who decorated them and the methods they used, and discussing what’s happened to many of them now.

It’s a somewhat embarrassing chapter in Catholic history to many modern Catholics, but even as it seems pretty odd to me now, I can still imagine the faith and love people had for these relics, so lovingly decorated. Sometimes it was to show off, sometimes it was to pull in crowds, of course — but it was also an act of faith. I did my best to remember that while looking at these images.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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