Tag: history

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 Book Forger

Posted August 12, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Book Forger

The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime That Fooled The World

by Joseph Hone

Genres: Mystery, Non-fiction
Pages: 336
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books.

One night, two young booksellers - one a dishevelled former communist, the other a martini-swilling fan of detective stories - stumble upon a strange discrepancy. It will lead them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem. Inspired by the vogue for Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, the pair harness the latest developments in forensic analysis to crack the case, but find its extent is greater than they ever could have imagined. By the time they are done, their investigation will have rocked the book world to its core.

I have a weird quibble with Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger which is going to sound very, very niche, but took me aback: he talks about Dorothy L. Sayers, and compares the real people about whom he’s writing to her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. He quotes from The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and then… very bizarrely gets everything wrong, claiming that Wimsey has found arsenic on the victim’s shoe (no, he found varnish) and that he died of it (no, he died of digitalin). What actually happens is that Wimsey visits the analyst with the varnish sample, and the analyst is finishing up with a sample that’s full of arsenic unrelated to Wimsey’s case.

It’s just a weird sloppy mistake, and it’s not germane to the overall point he’s making or the real detective work he’s recounting, but at the same time… if he can’t manage to read that scene properly, or research it to check his recollection is correct, how do I trust the rest of the book?

I keep getting stick now and then for noticing and caring about this sort of thing (and counting it into my ratings), but in non-fiction, it does matter. If you get wrong a point I can verify, or interpret a study without noticing it has bias (in the technical sense, e.g. like selection bias), or just make a muck of explaining something I understand well… how can I trust the rest of the work?

Now, that aside I did rather enjoy The Book Forger. I knew little about Thomas J. Wise beforehand, and nothing at all about the two men who unmasked him (Pollard and Carter), so the fact that it’s careful to set the scene is helpful, though there’s a certain amount of imaginative reconstruction (quoting e.g. letters wherever possible).

It’s worth keeping in mind while reading it that a certain amount of it is fiction in a sense, but it does lay out the likely events, grounded in the evidence that’s available (so far as I can tell), and it is quite the story. I’d maybe have liked to see the impacts a bit more: do the fakes still circulate? Might there be more that we haven’t identified and dissected? How has it impacted e.g. scholarship?

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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Review – Chinese Dress in Detail

Posted July 17, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Chinese Dress in Detail

Chinese Dress in Detail

by Sau Fong Chan

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 224
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

Chinese Dress in Detail reveals the beauty and variety of Chinese dress for women, men, and children, both historically and geographically, showcasing the intricacy of decorative embroidery and rich use of materials and weaving and dyeing techniques. The reader is granted a unique opportunity to examine historical clothing that is often too fragile to display, from quivering hair ornaments, stunning silk jackets and coats, festive robes, and pleated skirts, to pieces embellished with rare materials such as peacock-feather threads or created through unique craft skills, as well as handpicked contemporary designs.

A general introduction provides an essential overview of the history of Chinese dress, plotting key developments in style, design, and mode of dress, and the traditional importance of clothing as social signifier, followed by eight thematic chapters that examine Chinese dress in exquisite detail from head to toe. Each garment is accompanied by a short text and detail photography; front-and-back line drawings are provided for key items.

An extraordinary exploration of the splendor and complexity of Chinese garments and accessories, Chinese Dress in Detail will delight all followers of fashion, costume, and textiles.

The V&A’s Chinese Dress in Detail, written by Sau Fong Chan, is a gorgeous physical item with glossy pages full of colour photographs, displaying both close-ups and zoomed out images that give you an idea of what the full garment looks like, and accompanied by sketches of how the garments are put together, and at times with useful context like illustrations from the period.

The book has a useful introduction setting the scene, and then each garment has its own little description/discussion section. Most of the garments get a full double-page spread. It’s only a sampling, inevitably, but Sau Fong Chan has selected garments that represent different ethnic groups within China like the Uyghurs and the Miao, and tries to be clear about how diverse “Chinese” fashion can be.

It was fascinating and beautiful, and I recommend it if you have an interest!

Rating: 5/5 (“it was amazing”)

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Review – The Cleopatras

Posted July 12, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – The Cleopatras

The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt

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

Cleopatra: lover, seductress, and Egypt's greatest queen. A woman more myth than history, immortalized in poetry, drama, music, art, and film. She captivated Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, the two greatest Romans of the day, and died in a blaze of glory, with an asp clasped to her breast - or so the legend tells us.

But the real-life story of the historical Cleopatra VII is even more compelling. She was the last of seven Cleopatras who ruled Egypt before it was subsumed into the Roman Empire. The seven Cleopatras were the powerhouses of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, the Macedonian family who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great. Emulating the practices of the gods, the Cleopatras married their full-blood brothers and dominated the normally patriarchal world of politics and warfare. These extraordinary women keep a close grip on power in the wealthiest country of the ancient world.

Each of the seven Cleopatras wielded absolute power. Their ruthless, single-minded, focus on dominance - generation after generation - resulted in extraordinary acts of betrayal, violence, and murder in the most malfunctional dynasty in history.

Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones offers fresh and powerful insight into the real story of the Cleopatras, and the beguiling and tragic legend of the last queen of Egypt.

I really enjoyed Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’ The Cleopatras, which discusses and follows not just “the” Cleopatra, Cleopatra VII, but the whole female line of the Ptolemy dynasty, filling out the background that made the famous Cleopatra who she was, and introducing a wider audience to some pretty incredible women.

It’s a fascinating history, and a part of Egyptian history that I was never that keen on as a kid and thus never learned a lot about (I preferred the period before the Romans started meddling). Llewellyn-Jones manages to write in a way that keeps things fresh and interesting and mostly helps keep things straight, despite the plethora of repeated names. I found it a little distracting and weird when he translated Ptolemy IX Soter II’s nickname (Lathyros) and then just called him “Chickpea” all the time. It was kinda… cutifying? And I’m not sure any of the Ptolemys deserve to be cutified, I’ll be honest, even as they were fascinating people as described here.

The main drawback is that there aren’t numbered references, and sometimes he doesn’t even explain the nature of the evidence he’s using to decide something. For example, he asserts that “Chickpea” and Cleopatra IV were a love match — why? He never explains, and you wouldn’t expect so from the way they later behave.

So it’s all thorough and fascinating, but perhaps not one to take too seriously if you’re looking to research. It does have a section of “useful materials” and a bibliography, though, so the sources are relatively available to follow up (if not quite as conveniently as with numbered footnotes).

Rating: 4/5

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