Reviews

On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S.Q. Visser explores the long history of anti-intellectualism from the death of Socrates to the culture wars.

The Queenship of Mathilda of Flanders, c.1031-1083: Embodying Conquest by Laura L. Gathagan traces the material legacy of the Conqueror’s consort.

Two recent books, The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein and Revolutions: A New History by Donald Sassoon, illustrate the past and future of revolutionary studies.

It may not have been the first, argues John Hardiman in The French Revolution: A Political History, but it was the first of its kind.

A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda by Derek R. Peterson looks for the ordinary people who kept the regime’s wheels turning.

African queens and Anglo-Saxon towns, Indira Gandhi and Irish STEM, Celtic Studies and the caste system: 10 more historians choose their favourite new history books of 2025.

Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era by David N. Hempton peers beyond the pulpit and into the congregation.

Peasants and popes, free speech and fashion, sentimentality and special forces: the first 10 of 20 historians choose their favourite new history books of 2025.

Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery by Miranda Kaufman follows the money to reveal how Britain’s women of means profited from plantations.

In Turncoat: Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of Cromwell’s Spy, Dennis Sewell asks whether George Downing was the ‘biggest scoundrel in Stuart England’?