Reviews in History features a timely book this week, as Pamela Pilbeam and Mark Traugott discuss the latter’s The Insurgent Barricade. This traces the use of barricades in public uprisings from the Day of the Barricades in 1588 through to the Paris Commune of 1871.

More recently, though, the ‘Arab Spring’ has brought the barricade back into fashion, as protesters barricaded themselves into Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising. Could we even see them on the streets of London sometime soon?