To those of you who have experienced any difficulties this week accessing Reviews, many apologies – the whole of the University was affected by a network outage caused by a software bug. As you can tell, I haven’t a clue what was going on, but it certainly demonstrated how little can be done in these days in the absence of the internet. People we hadn’t seen in the flesh for years gathered pensively in our office, sipping tea and attempting to answer trivia questions without the benefit of Google…
Anyway, thank the masters of the web, we are back in action in time for our reviews, which this week start with The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender, and Politics in Britain, 1918-1945, edited by Julie Gottlieb and Richard Toye. Tehmina Goskar and the editors discuss a painstaking work which the reviewer believes shows the need to return to women’s rather than gender history (no. 1594, with response here).
Next up is Rasid Khalidi’s Brokers of Deceit: How the US has undermined peace in the Middle East, which Daniel Strieff finds a cogently argued, timely and highly readable book (no. 1593).
Then we turn to English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829 by Francis Young. Emilie Murphy recommends this book to anyone interested in the history of Catholicism, the intellectual and religious history of post-Reformation England, and early modern engagement with the supernatural (no. 1592).
Finally we have Eyal Poleg’s Approaching the Bible in Medieval England, which Richard Marsden praises as an ambitious book which tackles a massive range of material with great assurance (no. 1591).