Reviews

Planter and his Wife, with a Servant, Agostino Brunias, c.1780. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Public Domain.

‘Heiresses’ by Miranda Kaufman review

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

Oliver Cromwell chopping down ‘The Royall Oake of Brittayne’, 1653. Prints, Drawings and Watercolors from the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. Public Domain.

‘Turncoat’ by Dennis Sewell review

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’?

Cross-section drawing of Maginot Line, April 1938. Everett Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

‘The Maginot Line’ by Kevin Passmore review

The Maginot Line: A New History by Kevin Passmore confronts the myths surrounding the fall of France in 1940.

The Portuguese slaver Diligenté captured by H.M. Sloop Pearl, Lieutenant Henry Samuel Hawker, May 1838. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Public Domain.

‘The Heretic of Cacheu’ and ‘Worlds of Unfreedom’ review

The Heretic of Cacheu by Toby Green and Worlds of Unfreedom by Roquinaldo Ferreira, painstakingly recreate the worlds at the beginning and end of Portugal’s slave trade.

Pripyat City Park, Wendelin Jacober, 2016. Public Domain.

‘Chernobyl Children’ by Melanie Arndt review

Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster by Melanie Arndt discovers how Soviet civil society flourished – and then faltered – in the fallout.

A parade in Salamanca celebrates the occupation of Gijón by Francoist troops, September 1937. Geopix/Alamy Stock Photo.

‘El Generalísimo’ by Giles Tremlett book review

El Generalísimo: Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness by Giles Tremlett considers the making of the mediocrity at the heart of modern Spain.

‘The Second Emancipation’ by Howard W. French

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French traces the line between civil rights in the US and decolonisation in Africa.

U Thant, with under-secretary-general for special political affairs Ralph Bunch, at the United Nations, Bernard Gotfryd, 1966. Library of Congress. Public Domain.

‘Peacemaker’ by Thant Myint-U review

Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s by Thant Myint-U captures the optimism and ambition of Burma’s bridge between worlds.

‘The end of a Bohemian vampire as his coffin is opened and a red hot iron is plunged into his evil heart’. Illustration by René de Moraine from Paul Féval’s Les Tribunaux Secrets, 1872. Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo.

‘Killing the Dead’ by John Blair review

In Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, John Blair proves that you can’t keep a good corpse down.

The ceiling of the Tomb of the Diver, Paestum, c.480 BC. Peregrine/Alamy Stock Photo.

‘The Diver of Paestum’ by Tonio Hölscher review

The Diver of Paestum: Youth, Eros and the Sea in Ancient Greece by Tonio Hölscher – and translated by Robert Savage – searches beneath the surface for the meaning behind a beguiling fresco.