Reviews

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore gives a human face to magic in medieval and early modern England.

In Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution, Anne Higonnet brings three dedicated followers of fashion to the fore.

Liberty’s Grid: A Founding Father, a Mathematical Dreamland, and the Shaping of America by Amir Alexander explains how the grid system put the United States on the map.

Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu has plenty of copy but is it right?

Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement by Roland Philipps unearths the complexities and contradictions of the Irish rebel.

Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire by Raymond Jonas reveals the cynicism and hubris behind Napoleon III’s Mexican misadventure.

In Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World, Roger Crowley explains how Spain and Portugal turned up the heat in the age of imperialism.

In Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans: The British Occupation of Germany, 1945-49, Daniel Cowling brings lost stories to light – some of them, at least.

Sarah Wise’s The Undesirables: The Law that Locked Away a Generation lays bare the cruelty and injustice of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.

In The House Divided: Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East Barnaby Rogerson seeks geopolitical answers for ideological conflicts.