Women’s Lives and Clothes in WW2

Lucy Adlington • £30
Pen & Sword

This book offers a unique, illustrated insight into the experiences of women worldwide during World War Two and its aftermath. The history of ten tumultuous years is reflected in clothes, fashion, accessories and uniforms. As housewives, fighters, fashion designers or spies, women dressed the part when they took up their wartime roles.

Attractive to a general reader as well as interesting to a specialist, it focuses on the experiences of British women, then expands to encompass every continent affected by war. Woven through all cultures and countries are common threads of service, survival, resistance and emotion. Historian Lucy Adlington draws on interviews with wartime women, as well as her own archives and costume collection. Well-known names and famous exploits are featured…and many never-before-told stories of quiet heroism.

It is richly illustrated throughout, with many previously unpublished photographs, 1940s costumes and fabulous fashion images.

Four Queens and a Countess

Jill Armitage • £9.99
Amberley Books

When Mary Stuart was forced off the Scottish throne she fled to England, a move that made her cousin Queen Elizabeth very uneasy. Elizabeth had continued the religious changes made by her father and England was a Protestant country, yet ardent Catholics plotted to depose Elizabeth and put Mary Stuart on the English throne. So what was Queen Elizabeth going to do with a kingdomless queen likely to take hers?

Elizabeth had Mary placed under house arrest with her old friend Bess of Hardwick, then married to her fourth husband, the wealthy and influential Earl of Shrewsbury. For sixteen years, with the never-ending threat of a Catholic uprising, Bess was forced to accommodate Mary and her entourage at enormous cost to both her finances and her marriage. Bess had also known the doomed Jane Grey and Mary I, Elizabeth’s predecessor. She had been in service in the Grey household and companion to the infant Jane. Mary had been godmother to Bess’s fifth child.

Four Queens and a Countess delves deep into the relationships of these women with their insurmountable differences, the way they tried to accommodate them and the lasting legacy this has left.

Battles of the Jacobite Rebellions

Jonathan Oates • £25
Pen & Sword

Many books have been written about the Jacobite rebellions – the armed attempts made by the Stuarts to regain the British throne between 1689 and 1746 – and in particular about the risings of 1689, 1715, 1719 and 1745. The key battles have been described in graphic detail. Yet no previous book has given a comprehensive military account of the campaigns in their entirety – and that is the purpose of Jonathan Oates’s new history.

The author uses vivid eyewitness testimony and contemporary sources, as well as the latest archaeological evidence, to trace the course of the conflict, and offers an absorbing insight into the makeup of the opposing sides, their leadership, their troops and the strategy and tactics they employed. His distinctive approach gives the reader a long perspective on a conflict which is often viewed more narrowly in terms of famous episodes and the careers of the leading men.

The Forgotten Past

Andrew Vinken • £8.99

We’ve all been taught about kings and queens, great battles and the rise and fall of empires. But what about the ordinary folk? What about almost everybody who ever existed? This book consists of fascinating stories and anecdotes throughout history, such as how a Bristol merchant may have played a part in giving America its name; why a First World War naval battle was fought in a jungle, and how Sir David Attenborough helped to solve a Victorian murder mystery.