The Family Tree Irish Genealogy Guide: How to Trace Your Ancestors in Ireland

Claire Santry • £19.99

This in-depth guide from Irish genealogy expert Claire Santry will take you step-by-step through the journey of discovering your Irish roots. You’ll learn how to identify immigrant ancestor, find your family’s county and townland of origin, and locate key genealogical resources that will breathe life into your family tree. With historical timelines, sample records, resource lists, and detailed information about where and how to find your ancestors online, this guide has everything you need to uncover your Irish heritage.

Long Live the King: The Mysterious Fate of Edward II

Kathryn Warner • £20
The History Press

Edward II’s death at Berkeley Castle in 1327, murdered by having a red-hot poker inserted inside him, is one of the most famous and lurid tales in all of English history. But is it true? For five and a half centuries, few people questioned it, but with the discovery in a Montpellier archive of a remarkable document, an alternative narrative has presented itself: that Edward escaped from Berkeley Castle and made his way to Ireland, to the pope in Avignon and through Brabant, Cologne and Milan to an Italian hermitage. Was Edward in fact still alive years after his supposed death? Many influential people among his contemporaries certainly believed that he was, and acted upon that belief. In Long Live the King, medieval historian Kathryn Warner explores in detail Edward’s downfall and forced abdication in 1326/27, the role played in it by his wife Isabella of France, the wide variation in chronicle accounts of his murder at Berkeley Castle, and the fascinating possibility that Edward lived on in Italy for many years after his official funeral was held in Gloucester in December 1327.

The Complete Book of Heraldry

Stephen Slater • £7.99

This informative book looks not only at the medieval world in which heraldry thrived, but also at its language, the elaborate system of coded messages it conveyed, and its inextricable link with chivalry. Featuring more than 700 illustrations, it also covers both the larger aspects of heraldry and everyday heraldic uses, and contains a comprehensive glossary.The international uses of heraldry and the way different countries have interpreted it are also included. Most of Europe and the Americas are covered as well as Scandinavia, Africa and Japan. Novices and experts alike will benefit from the breadth of the content of this masterly history.

Passchendaele 1917: The Tommies’ Experience of the Third Battle of Ypres

Robert J Parker • £20
Amberley Books

The Battle of Passchendaele was in many ways worse than the Somme. The British offensive, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, was launched on the Belgium battlefield at 3.30am. on 31 July 1917. Passchendaele continued until November 1917 and became synonymous with the tragedy of the Great War: abominable weather, mud and filth; horrific injuries inflicted by increasingly industrialised warfare including tanks, gas, mines and flamethrowers; the enormous casualties (600,000) and the futility of the operation all combined to form a nightmare vision of war in the trenches. What was life like for the ordinary British soldier? Was the whole bloody effort necessary or were there alternatives? What, if anything, did it achieve? Passchendaele 1917 answers these questions while reminding us of the sacrifices and heroism of the soldiers who fought it.

A Nearly Infallible History of the Reformation

Nick Page • £18.99

Humorous historian Nick Page brings his skills to bear on this key period in European (and world) history in order to uncover everything you need to know about the Reformation – with a fair few bits you never wanted to know thrown in for good measure. Who were the winners and the losers, the ogres and the beauty queens of this key moment in church history? This book has the answers.

Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of our Relationship

Ulrich Raulff • £25
Penguin Random House

Farewell to the Horse is an engaging, brilliantly written and moving discussion of what horses once meant to us. Cities, farmland, entire industries were once shaped as much by the needs of horses as humans. The intervention of horses was fundamental in countless historical events. They were sculpted, painted, cherished, admired; they were thrashed, abused and exposed to terrible danger. From the Roman Empire to the Napoleonic Empire every world-conqueror needed to be shown on a horse. Tolstoy once reckoned that he had cumulatively spent some nine years of his life on horseback. Ulrich Raulff ’s book was a bestseller in Germany.