This book was gifted to me by the publisher, Granta Books, for a blog post, but the post is entirely my own words and hasn't been pre-approved. In 1891 Katherine Routledge went up to Oxford to study a diploma in anthropology,…

Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain by Jessica Meyer, (Palgrave, 2008) A couple of years ago I went through a phase of reading a number of First World War books all based on "bringing to life&qu…

Follow my blog with Bloglovin Tom Isitt, Riding in the Zone Rouge , (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019) - £20 . Tom Isitt's new book, Riding in the Zone Rouge , is the both the story of cycling's 1919 Tour of the Battlef…

Keith Jeffery, 1916: A Global History, Bloomsbury (2015). £12.99 I picked up 1916: A Global History  on a whim in Waterstones last year as it looked to have an interesting concept, solely considering one year in the middle…

Sarah Reay, The Half-Shilling Curate (Helion and Company, 2016). Second Edition - £20 . The Half-Shilling Curate, or more accurately the Rev. Herbert Cowl MC, served as a chaplain in the First World War, both in France and…

Harper Collins, 2014. £9.99 ( harpercollins.co.uk ) It feels somewhat insensitive to simply review the diary of a First World War soldier, even one that has been compiled into a modern publication. Gerry Harrison may have done …

Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History, (London: Profile Books, 2009), (2010 paperback; £8.99 ). It's not strictly First World War history and this isn't strictly a review, but a recent charity shop fi…

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History ,  Prof Jay Winter  - £12.99 (paperback)  www.cambridge.org ,  Cambridge University Press, 1995 (2014). ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ - A must-read seminal study into the…

Men of Letters: The Post Office Heroes who Fought the Great War ,  Duncan Barrett  - £8.99  www.shop.theaa.com   AA Media, 2014. ⭐⭐ - An interesting subject, but inaccurate  and woolly history Men of Letters  is a history o…

The Old Front Line,  John Masefield   - £9.99  www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Pen and Sword Books, 2006 edition with preface by Martin Middlebrook and an introduction on The Battle of the Somme by Col. Howard Green ⭐⭐⭐ - A poetic d…