You wouldn’t guess from the cover design—three songbirds silhouetted over swatches of picturesque Englishness—but Catherine Clarke’s A History of England in 25 Poems hits one of its sweet spots with a

Daniel Anlezark Constructing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles 310pp. D. S. Brewer. £95. Janet Bately, Joseph C. Harris and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, with Susan Irvine, editors and translators The Old Engl

Alice Loxton EleanorA 200-mile walk in search of England’slost queen352pp. Pan Macmillan. £22. Many are commemorated in stone, but few so grandly as Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290). Following her unexpec

A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National ...

Best books… Roy Foster The emeritus professor of ...

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me