Tag: history

Review – The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks

Posted December 8, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks

The Secret Life of Lego Bricks: The Inside Story of a Design Icon

by Daniel Konstanski

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 342
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Building the ordinary into the extraordinary ā€“ brick by brick.

This first official book for Adult Fans of LEGO takes the reader on a visually stunning journey from the very earliest hollow bricks to the complex shapes and building techniques of today.

LEGOĀ® bricks are design icons and marvels of engineering. Virtually unchanged for over fifty years, the brick is still at the very centre of ethos: each brick connects to every other brick, allowing the construction of almost anything you can imagine. LEGO minifigures may be the friendly faces of the LEGO world, but bricks in all their different shapes and forms are its very foundation.

The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks explores the brickā€™s rich history in full colour and unparalleled detail. Granted unprecedented access by the LEGO Group, Daniel Konstantski has interviewed design masters, element testers and the so-called ā€˜rock starsā€™, the set designers, to reveal for the first time how and why new LEGO bricks are made.

This is the book the fans have always wanted: a truly behind-the-scenes look at the story of the beloved LEGO brick and the company which makes it, with a wealth of exclusive visual material from the LEGO Archive in Billund.

LEGO fans have long wanted to learn the inside story of beloved LEGO bricks from inside the LEGO Group: to have long-standing questions answered and see the veil pulled back on how LEGO elements and products came to market ā€“ or didnā€™t ā€“ through the LEGO brickā€™s 70 year history. Such an authoritative telling of the story has never been possible ā€“ until now.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Daniel Konstanski’sĀ The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks digs into a lot of the things that make LEGO tick: the nuts and bolts of how the bricks work (like their “clutch power”) as well as the company, the principles behind it, etc. I had no idea how “controversial” some bricks were within LEGO (like moulded animals rather than built animals), or about some of the partnerships and lines they’ve done.

There’s quite a bit of technical detail, and even though I’m not a huge LEGO fan myself, I found it a fascinating read because of the way it digs into the processes of design and bringing out new bricks and sets, the constraints on them, and the ethos of the company. It’s well-illustrated with lots of examples and sketches, as well. I can definitely think of a nerd who’s going to get this from me for Christmas.

And of course, if you’re a mega fan of LEGO, this is likely to go double for you.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail

Posted December 8, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail

Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail

by Lucy Johnston

Genres: Fashion, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 144
Series: Fashion in Detail
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

From the delicate embroidery on ballgowns to the vibrant synthetic colors of crinolines, the major themes of 19th-century fashion are explored as never before in this exquisite book. Featuring specially commissioned color photographs of garments from the V&A's superb collection and many close-up details, alongside accurate line drawings of each garment's underlying structure, the book's 150 pieces capture the opulence and variety of this fascinating era.

Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail is very much what it says on the tin, discussing the fashions of the nineteenth century through the V&A’s collection, in a series of themed chapters that discuss different trends in fashion.

As usual with this series, the photography is great and there are line sketches of the garments as well to help you envision how they look as a whole — but quite often the whole garment is not pictured, only parts of it, which can be more than a little frustrating (especially to someone who can’t visualise things well).

There are some lovely choices, and I always enjoy when they point out the specifics of the garment in question too (e.g. that you can see traces of unpicking where a gown has been remodelled to suit a new fashion), rather than just discussing generalities.

It’s a nice volume, but again, I just have that little niggle about not showing the full garments!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry

Posted December 3, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry

The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry

by David Musgrove, Michael Lewis

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

Most people know that the Bayeux Tapestry depicts the moment when the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold Godwinson, was defeated at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 by his Norman adversary William the Conqueror. However, there is much more to this historic treasure than merely illustrating the outcome of this famous battle. Full of intrigue and violence, the tapestry depicts everything from eleventh-century political and social life--including the political machinations on both sides of the English Channel in the years leading up to the Norman Conquest--to the clash of swords and stamp of hooves on the battle field.

Drawing on the latest historical and scientific research, authors David Musgrove and Michael Lewis have written the definitive book on the Bayeux Tapestry, taking readers through its narrative, detailing the life of the tapestry in the centuries that followed its creation, explaining how it got its name, and even offering a new possibility that neither Harold nor William were the true intended king of England. The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry explores the complete tale behind this medieval treasure that continues to amaze nearly one thousand years after its creation.

Michael Lewis and David Musgrove’sĀ The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry is pretty fascinating. The Bayeux Tapestry (yes, I know, it’s actually an embroidery) is something that crops up all over the place, with disconnected pieces getting used for evidence or focused on, but somehow I hadn’t really read anything digging into it fully. I was delighted by this deep dive, which considers loads of different questions about the artwork: who made it? Where? For whom? Why?

They do pick favoured theories eventually, but they’re careful to discuss a number of different ideas, with the support for each, making it clearĀ why they’ve plumped for e.g. the work actually being done in Canterbury, with Bishop Odo as the patron, etc, etc. There are more questions hovering around the tapestry — the identity of certain figures, the meaning of particular episodes, the meaning of the borders — than I’d realised, and of course, many of the questions in all likelihood can’t be answered with any certainty.

The one complaint would be that it would’ve been good to illustrate it much more heavily with the pieces of the embroidery being discussed; the colour plates don’t exactly zoom in on the details, and anyway it’d be easier if the images accompanied the text. It’d balloon out the page count, of course, but isn’t it worth it when discussing such a highly visual medium?

Still, I enjoyed this a lot.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape

Posted November 30, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape

Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape

by Carwyn Graves

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

A journey through the natural landscapes of Wales.

In Tir -- the Welsh word for "land" -- writer and ecologist Carwyn Graves takes us on a tour of seven key characteristics of the Welsh landscape. He explores such elements as the ffridd, or mountain pasture, and the rhos, or wild moorland, and examines the many ways humans interact with and understand the natural landscape around them. Further, he considers how this understanding can be used to combat climate change and improve wildlife populations and biodiversity.

By diving deep into the history and ecology of each of these landscapes, we discover that Wales, in all its beautiful variety, is just as much a human cultural creation as a natural phenomenon: its raw materials evolved alongside the humans that have lived here since the ice receded.

Carwyn Graves’ Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape took me longer to read than expected. It was very nice to read a book by a Welsh person, steeped in Welsh culture, acknowledging that the Welsh are indigenous people and have a long, long, long history of being wrapped up in the landscape. He does mention that being Welsh has a lot to do with language, and that’s not how I see being Welsh (given I was raised in England and speak only English), but nonetheless his love for the land, the language, and the culture entwining the two is clear and enjoyable to read.

(Lest you wonder, I’m with Glyn Jones in The Dragon Has Two Tongues: “To me, anyone can be a Welshman who chooses to be so and is prepared to take the consequences.”)

I think Graves is a little idealistic at times, and obviously chooses examples which suit his theories — but I think he is also fairly convincing that Welsh traditions of farming can boost biodiversity, soil retention, water management, and even food security, and that these efforts will be better for the people and the land than conservation or rewilding per se (though at times I felt these were put up as straw men: there are many ways of doing conservation and rewilding), even if it involves cutting some peat for fires over the winter, etc. The Welsh names for the landscape often tell us how certain fields were used, and the farmers who once worked that land knew what it was good for: we should listen.

I did also learn some new snippets of Welsh history, for example about the (often successful) fight back against enclosure in Wales.

But, overall, looking back… I did feel a bit of a tinge of unwelcomeness myself in the Wales that Graves describes and champions. If (and when) I come back to Wales to live permanently, as I hope to do, I will be one of the people who Graves seems to feel can’t (or won’t) connect into the local culture and language. I have a local network in Wales, but it isn’t farmers and poets, we don’t swap englyn, and I’d be surprised if anyone knows how to cut peat in the ancient ways.

For all that, I think Graves is wrong and that anyone can belong here if they love the land. I was here every holiday when I was little, and I lived here for university and a few years beyond that, and I too feel a connection to it: it’s my home. I may not be able to tell rhos from mynydd, but Wales will still have me, from the city streets I knew best to the path up Caerphilly Mountain, walking along in the shade of the hedgerow where all the conkers fall, up to the “secret” patch of blackberries my grandad liked to pick, and back down through a patch of woodland along by the train tracks.

It doesn’t matter whether I can say all that in Welsh. It’s my home too.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – The Book of Were-Wolves

Posted November 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Book of Were-Wolves

The Book of Were-Wolves: Were-Wolf History and Folklore

by Sabine Baring-Gould

Genres: Crime, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 142
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

First published in 1865, Sabine Baring-Gouldā€™s "The Book of Were-Wolves" is the first serious academic study and one of the finest ever done on the subject of lycanthropy and werewolf lore.
With the shocking histories of 10 famous cases, this classic blends science, superstition, and fiction to tell the full story of the were-wolves among us.

Not relegating the were-wolf just to a secular and sceptical study, nor simply to spiritual banter, Baring-Gould manages to compress an enormous span of historical material into his work; a work which is no doubt of value to the academic and those involved with the occult at the same time.

Sabine Baring-Gould’sĀ The Book of Were-Wolves was a bit of a random choice from the Serial Reader catalogue, solely because it was kinda apropos for spoopy season. Baring-Gould was an antiquarian and collector of folk lore, and this book is a collection of folklore about lycanthropy, along with some of his musings about where such stories may come from.

He dug into a bunch of texts for this, and I found his discussion of shape-changing (not always into wolves) in Norse mythology pretty interesting — I know the texts, but hadn’t really looked at them from that point of view before.

However, he also theorises about what gives rise to talk of lycanthropy, blaming mental illness, and starts discussing real-life cases of horrific murder, etc, etc. That bit gets a bit long and to my mind irrelevant, and doesn’t really have any conclusions.

Still, kinda interesting!

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – The House Dress

Posted November 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The House Dress

The House Dress: A Story of Eroticism and Fashion

by Elda Danese

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

The idea of the house dress is closely related to the concept of housework and domesticity. At the same time, it is distinguished by not being a uniform, thanks in particular to the decorations of the fabric. Starting in the late 1940s, a whole series of movies contributed to its image through a gallery of remarkable female characters, the latest of which is Pedro Almodovarā€™s film Volver, with a female lead who is equipped with a wardrobe full of beautifully ornamented house dresses. After taking into account its distinctive and expressive features, author Elda Danese traces the circumstances that led to the success and the worldwide use of the house dress over a period spanning from the 1920s to the present.

Elda Danese’sĀ The House DressĀ is a pretty dry and academic discussion of the evolution, use and meaning of the house dress, digging into a bit of the history of it, the words used for it, and how it’s been used in cinema as well.

It’s not a subject I know a lot about; a bit from the various fashion history books I’ve read, and a bit from the Great British Sewing Bee (at least, definitely last season’s tribute to Diane von FĆ¼rstenberg, but I’m pretty sure I remember other wrap dress/house dress challenges), so this did fill in some gaps, but it was also probably a bit too scholarly for me — where fashion history is concerned, I know very little, enjoy reading about it, and for the most part let the knowledge go again, ahaha.

So overall probably not one for the casual reader, though it does include a lot of reference images!

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside

Posted November 24, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside

Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside: Treasure and Ghosts in the London Clay

by Victoria Shepherd

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 400
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

June 1912. A pair of workmen deposit a heavy ball of clay in the antiques shop of George Fabian Lawrence, or ā€˜Stony Jackā€™ as he's better known. As Lawrence picks through the mud, a speck of gold catches his eye. A pearl earring tumbles into his hand, then another. A Burmese ruby follows; then Colombian emeralds, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and turquoise from Iran; tankards; watches; topaz; amazonite.

Stony Jack has discovered the greatest single cache of Elizabethan treasure.

Diving into Londonā€™s bustling, sometimes lawless, antiques trade at the turn of the century, Victoria Shepherd provides a compelling portrait of the city at the height of empire. A thrilling ride through Edwardian London, from the marble halls of the British Museum to the East End's maze of tenements and alleyways, Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside oversees the transformation of the city into a modern metropolis.

Victoria Shepherd’sĀ Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside digs into the story of the Cheapside Hoard, a cache of jewellery and gems from the 16th-17th century found during building work in 1912. “Stony Jack” was the navvies’ name for G.F. Lawrence, an antiquarian-cum-pawnshop owner who did work for various museums and spent most of his life hanging around construction sites hoping to swoop on interesting finds (including but not limited to jewellery). Shepherd traces the fate of the hoard, tries to figure out to whom it belonged, and discusses the lives of various people who were involved with it in some way.

There are a few problems with it, fascinating as I find that. The first is that Shepherd never met a digression or a wild supposition that she didn’t love. Everything is “maybe Queen Mary was in a car accident somewhere near Stony Jack’s shop because she wanted to go look at it”. And maybe not?! This isn’t fact, unless there’s some shred of evidence other than geographical closeness. There’s loads about Howard Carter, who had nothing to do with the hoard itself, beyond knowing Lawrence. And yet for all that, she choosesĀ not to dig into the sordid details of the paedophilia that one of the major players was involved in, explicitly eliding it to focus on her narrative, and allowing you to forget the man was total scum who abused children.

She also commits astonishing errors of fact in at least one field I know something about, Egyptology. Here’s one of her (very characteristic) run-on sentences, which contains so many errors it’s difficult to know where to start:

Now the world would know about the later kings of Egypt of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and Tutankhamun specifically, who, with his father, had reverted to the worship of one deity, Amun, the sun god, ending Egypt’s long-standing polytheism.

Akhenaten, who was probably (but not certainly) Tutankhamun’s father, worshipped theĀ Aten,Ā very much not Amun. The clue is in his name. Although his court at Amarna converted to monotheism, some no doubt more for political reasons than religious, the rest of Egypt didn’t instantly drop polytheism. This was not a “reversion”, either: Egypt hadn’t been monotheistic previously. You can’t revert to something you’ve never been.

Tutankhamun then later reverted to the worship of Amun, against his father rather than with him, and Amarna was abandoned. Polytheism in Egypt didn’t end: at best, it took a very, very short pause. Tutankhamun probably worshipped the Aten with his family when he was young, but he definitely didn’t “revert to the worship of one deity” with his father.

I unpack all that to give you the idea of how wildly bad Shepherd’s very basic scholarship is, so that you can take the book with appropriate heapings of salt on everything else. It’s just wrong in so many ways. And sure, maybe she’s better on her own ground,Ā but the facts of the Amarna Period in Egypt are so easy to discover that her ability to do basic fact checking seems suspect.

It’s a mildly entertaining read, but I fear that vast chunks of it are absolute fiction, even if it’s plausible fiction, and Shepherd’s scholarship is untrustworthy based on the aspects of it IĀ canĀ fact-check. It gets two stars because I did find it interesting enough to finish, but I can’t in good conscience give it more when it’s so very, very bad.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

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Review – No Ordinary Deaths

Posted November 20, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – No Ordinary Deaths

No Ordinary Deaths: A People's History of Mortality

by Molly Conisbee

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

History is written by the A-listers' deaths - the queens beheaded and archdukes assassinated. We hardly ever learn how ordinary folk met their end and with what consequences, or consider how death has moulded our beliefs, politics and societies through time.

Historian and bereavement counsellor Molly Conisbee reveals how cycles of dying, death and disposal have shaped the lives of everyday people. Richly told and startlingly fresh, Conisbee's evocations of a cross-dressing madam in Victorian London or the professional death-watchers of the Middle Ages, of wakes, plague pits and graverobbers, all paint a fascinating picture of the hopes, fears and wishes of our forebears.

Molly Conisbee’sĀ No Ordinary Deaths is a history of mortality as experienced by (some) people in the UK, trying to focus on those we know less about — not the deaths of kings and queens, but shopkeepers and housewives, servants and petty thieves. I found it mostly successful in providing something of that point of view, and appreciated some of the examples dug up, especially in the chapter about queer experiences and deaths.

That said, I don’t think it was a good choice for me to readĀ right now, because a central thing that Conisbee returns to again and again is that people these days aren’t in touch with death. Death happens away from the home, people don’t see corpses, people don’t sit with the dying, etc, etc… aaaand my constant urge was to call bullshit, because of course, that’s not my personal experience. I was with my grandmother when she died, quite intentionally; longer ago, I also saw my grandfather just after he died, and had intended to be there.

I’m sure I’m not alone in that, though I do think that the generalisationsĀ areĀ broadly correct — it’s just a raw spot for me right now, and bad timing to read this particular book. It’s possible it could be written without constantly harping on that theme, and I might’ve liked it more that way, but that doesn’t make it a bad book, just one I didn’t get along with right now.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Review – Eating to Extinction

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

Review – Eating to Extinction

Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need To Save Them

by Dan Saladino

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 464
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2022 - Eating to Extinction is an astonishing journey through the past, present and future of food, showing why reclaiming a diverse food culture is vital for our future.

From a tiny crimson pear in the west of England to an exploding corn in Mexico, there are thousands of foods that are at risk of being lost for ever. Dan Saladino spans the globe to uncover their stories, meeting the pioneering farmers, scientists, cooks, food producers and indigenous communities who are defending food traditions and fighting for change.

Eating to Extinction is about so much more than preserving the past. It is about the crisis facing our planet today, and why reclaiming a diverse food culture is vital for our future.

Dan Saladino’sĀ Eating to Extinction has a certain amount of inherent repetition: we’re losing a lot of rare and traditional foods because of monocultures, cultural homogenisation, loss of habitat, etc. Each example can start to feel like it’s really hammering home the point a bit too much, though it does help that the chapters are arranged by theme and he discusses a few representative cereal crops, a few representative animal breeds, etc.

Even though it’s a bit repetitive — and at times really sad, because we’re losing so much, some of which we barely know we have — I found it really fascinating to read through the various examples. It made me wonder about how things taste, whether I’d like them; I’m aware that in being quite sensitive to taste and texture, I benefit from a fairly homogenised world where a burger will always taste pretty much the same within fairly narrow boundaries, for instance. My snacks are alike, bag for bag, without a great deal of variation (if any) within a brand. But I’m still sure that there are tastes I’d love out there, things that would be worth trying.

As with so many things, the main story here is that humans are exploiting the environment and making changes that are going to shoot us in the foot. Monocultures are bad, and if we’re not careful, we could see huge famines. We’re losing genetic diversity in our food crops in searching for bigger and bigger yields, sometimes for good reason (to feed hungry people) and sometimes for mere profit.

I was already pretty alive to the problems of stuff like battery farm chickens, monoculture, etc; it wasn’t a wakeup call for me so much as a nudge to keep thinking about it, and to find ways to act, because awareness isn’t enough. And Saladino makes an excellent case for the delights we’re missing out on, and may lose forever.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Proto

Posted November 10, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Proto

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

by Laura Spinney

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

One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.

As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world's largest language family, the thread that connects disparate cultures: Dante's Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen?

Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings - the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost languages: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.

Laura Spinney’sĀ Proto is the story of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language of many modern languages. She tries to trace its origins and branching points based on various evidence: linguistic evidence, of course, but also archaeology and genetics, attempting to unpick not just the words that were spoken but the people who spoke them, and why. I really loved Spinney’s book on the 1918 flu pandemic, Pale Rider, so I was eager for this one.

I did find it an interesting read, though at times a bit difficult to follow because in the end there are a lot of possibilities, and for each branch of the whole chain Spinney discusses the various different theories. For that reason, perhaps, I liked it a bit less than Pale Rider; I guess it felt a bit less focused, more or less of necessity because of the material. It’s hard to pick your way between all the theories, and at times I felt like I needed diagrams to represent all the possibilities.

I did find at first that it wasn’t very focused on the linguistic side of things, lingering on the archaeological evidence of the Yamnaya and what we can extrapolate about them, but it does get more into the technical details (like the “ruki” rule, and satemisation), which was more what I’d expected and hoped for.

There are numbered references, an extensive bibliography and an index, which are all good signs, too!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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