Reviews

Bard romance? Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare by Will Tosh sets the stage for the next wave of accessible queer histories.

In Catherine de’ Medici: The Life and Times of the Serpent Queen, Mary Hollingsworth helps the pragmatic queen escape her ‘black legend’.

Outposts of Diplomacy: A History of the Embassy by G.R. Berridge shows us that debates about the role of the ambassador are as old as the institution itself.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard Evans asks what manner of men made themselves the Führer’s ‘paladins’.

A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic by Francis D. Cogliano explores a relationship more complex than that of comrades turned rivals.

In The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492, Marcy Norton shows through Indigenous American practices and beliefs that colonisation was a catastrophe for the natural world.

The Lost Queen: The Surprising Life of Catherine of Braganza, Britain’s Forgotten Monarch by Sophie Shorland returns the consort to her rightful place in Restoration history.

In Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History, Kim A. Wagner offers a blow-by-blow account of Bud Dajo. But is the devil truly in the detail?

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil and Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration bring Tudor and Stuart espionage in from the cold.

As the last living perpetrators are brought to justice, Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial in the Twenty-first Century by Tobias Buck wonders what purpose the prosecution of Bruno Dey serves.