For those interested in local history, a new book by Alan Fox seeks to test the hypothesis that there was, in England, a patchwork of historical regions (largely coinciding with major drainage basins) which in turn allied closely with pre-1974 counties – in other words, that these counties had their own regional identities stretching back to Anglo-Saxon times.

This theory, most strongly espoused in the past by Charles Phythian-Adams, is challenged by John Beckett in his review of Fox’s A Lost Frontier Revealed: Regional Separation in the East Midlands which is now available on the new-look Reviews in History site here.