Reviews

Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes follows the reinvention of the cat from working animal to purrfect pet.

The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain by Nicholas Popper explores the Elizabethan revolution in record keeping.

Cita Stelzer’s Churchill’s American Network and David Reynolds’ Mirrors of Greatness seek to bring Churchill’s contemporaries and adversaries out of his shadow.

The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby surfaces Umayyad and Abbasid perspectives on their Frankish frenemies.

Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement by Susannah Gibson makes a case for 18th-century proto-feminism. Do the Bluestockings fit?

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff refutes the claim by Virginia Woolf, that the women of Tudor England left only empty bookshelves.

How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War by Kimmo Rentola argues that political guile as much as military might stopped the Soviets in their tracks.

Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War between Science and Religion by Michael Taylor revels in the tangles of Victorian thought.

As Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO and NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance make clear, at almost every point in the last 75 years the alliance's future has looked uncertain.

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce is a tender study of European rural life. But is this lost past closer than we think?