Reviews

The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court by Breeze Barrington looks beyond the warming pan to the real Mary of Modena.

In The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 Jonathan Healey holds Juntos and ‘jittery times’ responsible for England’s slide towards civil war.

Though his relics are reviled, his impact is more keenly felt than ever. Can The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey find the man for our time?

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz, collects the works of Cuba's ‘Apostle of Independence’.

Hinduism predates colonialism by thousands of years, but in Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Manu S. Pillai explains how European ideas shaped Hindutva.

‘I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer’: Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column by Mary Beth Norton reveals the 17th-century origins of the agony aunt.

How did a Gulf backwater become a global powerbroker? Saudi Arabia: A Modern History by David Commins explores the uneasy alliance between oil, autocracy, and Wahhabism.

In Language and Social Relations in Early Modern England Hillary Taylor listens in the archives for the voices of ordinary people.

Long overshadowed by Lindbergh, The Big Hop: The First Non-Stop Flight Across the Atlantic and Into the Future by David Rooney returns Alcock and Brown to aviation's top flight.

The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine.