Reviews

An examination of the ‘fleeting, fine-grained intimacies’ of letters, diaries and memoirs produces a witty and scholarly account of Victorian attitudes to the body.

Microhistories, examining a range of notorious and mundane crimes, can help recover marginalised figures and forge links to wider cultural histories.

A vivid account of groundbreaking archaeological excavations at a Scottish site of crucial importance to the North Sea world.

A magisterial translation of a work that forms the basis of the European civil law tradition.

During the Enlightenment, Alexander the Great was reinvented as an esoteric ideal.

The story of the transportation of three obelisks to London, Paris and New York captures the 19th-century mania for all things Egyptian.

The great and not-so-great desert explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries are evocatively profiled.

While Montaigne: A Life by Philippe Desan review Montaigne might include debatable interpretations of his Essays, it is an essential study of the writer's life.

A compelling narrative on the machinations of a Borgia pope and his offspring, with the added spice of Machiavelli’s cool observations.

As Holocaust survivors die, new approaches are required to tell their history, as shown in this unsentimental, emphatic account of the inhabitants of a Berlin street.