In The Saga of the Earls of Orkney (Birlinn, 2025), Professor Judith Jesch presents a fascinating history of the Earldom of Orkney, which was established in the Viking Age, records the adventures, feuds and battles of powerful Norsemen during its first three centuries. The medieval earls of Orkney owed allegiance to the kings of Norway but their influence ranged from Britain and Ireland to Sweden and Russia, and they travelled as far as Narbonne, Crete and Jerusalem. Advised by bishops and formidable women, they and their henchmen jockeyed for power with each other and with neighbouring rulers in Scotland, often with murderous outcomes. In between the high politics and violence, the world of the earls was one of piety, poetry and feasting.

The Saga also provides rare glimpses of culture and everyday life in northern Scotland when it was central to the Viking diaspora. Set in a recognisable landscape, it mentions features, sites and even buildings that can still be seen today.

This new translation of the manuscripts of the Saga uses an innovative approach to presenting medieval sources to non-specialist audiences, highlighting textual variations that affect its interpretation. It also reflects saga style and language more closely than previous translations and is ideal for both research and reading aloud. This is an essential, detailed and up-to-date resource for academics and general readers who wish to know more about Viking and Norse Scotland.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Newsmongers unfolds the seedy history of tabloid journalism, from the first printed ‘Strange Newes’ sheets of the sixteenth century to the sensationalism of today’s digital age. The narrative weaves from Regency gossip writers through New York’s ‘yellow journalism’ battles to the ‘sex and sleaze’ Sun of the 1970s; and from the Brexit-backing populism of the Daily Mail to the celebrity-obsessed Mail Online of the 2000s. Colourful figures such as Daniel Defoe, Lord Northcliffe, Hugh Cudlipp, Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell are brought to vivid life. From scandalous confessions to the Leveson Inquiry, the book explores journalists’ unscrupulous methods, taking in phone hacking, privacy breaches and bribery. In the digital era, popular journalism succumbed to ‘churnalism’ while a certain royal is seeking revenge on the tabloids today.

Terry Kirby is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of The Trials of the Baroness (1991). He has been a journalist for more than four decades and was a founder member of staff at The Independent, where he worked for more than twenty years in a number of roles, including crime correspondent, night editor and chief reporter

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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A unique study of the only physical manuscript containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as both a material and literary object.
In this book, Arthur Bahr takes a fresh look at the four poems and twelve illustrations of the so-called “Pearl-Manuscript,” the only surviving medieval copy of two of the best-known Middle English poems: Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript, Bahr explores how the physical manuscript itself enhances our perception of the poetry, drawing on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-Manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood. By connecting the manuscript’s construction to the intricate language in the texts, Bahr suggests new ways to understand both what poetry is and what poetry can do.

Arthur Bahr is professor of literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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In this episode, Amina Easat Daas and Claudia Radiven were in conversation with Shabna Begum to discuss her work with the Runnymede Trust, a British race equality and civil rights think tank. Shabna has worked with Runnymede since 2021 as a Senior Researcher, before becoming Director of Research, and finally CEO in May 2024. She is also author of, From Sylhet to Spitalfields: Bengali squatters in 1970s East London (2023). Shabna spoke with us about a number of issues relating to Islamophobia, immigration and the resurgence of Far-Right politics in the UK.

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It is often assumed that only sovereign states can join the United Nations. But this was not always the case. At the founding of the United Nations, a loophole drafted by British statesmen in its predecessor organisation, the League of Nations, was carried forward, allowing colonies to accede as member-states. Colonies such as India, Ireland, Egypt, and many more were afforded a tokenistic representation at the League in Geneva during the interwar years, decades before their independence. Thomas Gidney’s An International Anomaly unites three geographically distinct case studies to demonstrate the evolution of Britain's policy from a range of different viewpoints, exploring how this policy came into being, and why it was only exploited by the British Empire. He argues that this membership shaped colonial norms around sovereignty and international recognition in the interwar period and to the present day.

Thomas Gidney is a postdoctoral researcher in international history and politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Lucas Tse is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognizably modern market of nationalized spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open to wider social strata. Delving into auction records, memoirs, newspaper articles, financial and legal documents in six languages, Alvi explores these cultural and socio-economic developments across the British, French, and German markets, as well as trade spheres such as Russia and Scandinavia. 1914 marked the end of the European art market and cemented the connection between art and finance. 

The European Art Market and the First World War: Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

Maddalena Alvi holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, an MSc in Economic and Social History from the University of Oxford, and an MLitt in Art History from the University of Glasgow.

Priya S. Gandhi is a writer and strategist based in New York City.

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A radical history of England, Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Katrina Navickas is a gripping overview of increasingly restrictive policing and legislation against protest in public spaces. It tells the long history of contests over Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Cable Street and Kinder Scout, as well as sites in towns and rural areas across the country. Dr. Navickas reveals how protesters claimed these spaces as their own commons, resisting their continuing enclosure and exclusion by social and political elites. She investigates famous and less well-known demonstrations and protest marches, from early democracy, trade union movements and the Suffragettes to anti-fascist, Black rights and environmental campaigners in more recent times. Contested Commons offers positive as well as troubling lessons on how we protect the right to protest.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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The transformation of the Labour Party by 1997 is among the most consequential political developments in modern British history. Futures of Socialism overhauls the story of Labour's modernisation and provides an innovative new history. Diving into the tumultuous world of the British left after 1973, rocked by crushing defeats, bitter schisms, and ideological disorientation, Colm Murphy uncovers competing intellectual agendas for modern socialism. Responding to deindustrialisation, neoliberalism, and constitutional agitation, these visions of 'modernisation' ranged across domestic and European policy and the politics of class, gender, race, and democracy. By reconstructing the sites and networks of political debate, Futures of Socialism: ‘Modernisation', the Labour Party, and the British Left, 1973–1997 (Cambridge UP, 2023) explains their changing influence inside Labour. It also throws new light on New Labour, highlighting its roots in this social-democratic intellectual maelstrom. Futures of Socialism provides an essential analysis of social democracy in an era of market liberalism, and of the ideas behind a historic political reconstruction that remains deeply controversial today.

Colm Murphy is a historian of modern British and Irish politics and political economy at Queen Mary University of London. He has published on 1970s-80s social democracy (including its political culture, evolving electoral strategy, and economic policymaking) and on Irish labour relations and nationalism in the 1910s. His more recent work has focused on the politics of economic policy, including Keynesianism, austerity, trade, and currency. Since 2018, Colm has worked for the Mile End Institute and is currently its Deputy Director.

Jacob Ward is a historian at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. He has written in the history of science and technology, environmental history, business and financial history, and political history. He recently published Visions of a Digital Nation: Market and Monopoly in British Telecommunications (MIT Press, 2024) and he’s currently working on a history of futurology in the United Kingdom and Europe from 1945 to the present day.

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In this episode, Amina Easat Daas and Claudia Radiven were in conversation with Peter Hopkins to discuss his work and most recent book, Everyday Islamophobia. The conversation ranged from UK counter-terror policy, to citizenship, the Far-Right, but largely on the mainstreaming of Islamophobia. Peter Hopkins is a Professor of Social Geography in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. His interests centre upon issues of social inequality and justice with most of his research focusing upon the intersections of youth, migration and asylum, race and religion, and gender.

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The pivotal year of 1870 brought down the curtain on the redcoat garrison world at both the metropolitan and colonial ends of the empire . . . In fewer than forty years, less than a lifetime, Aotearoa had gone from being a Māori world in which rangatira dominated, to a colony in which the settler state was in control of the economy, politics and people’s social destiny.

Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire (Bridget Williams Books, 2025) by Professor Charlotte Macdonald explores the lives of soldiers, sailors and their families stationed in Aotearoa New Zealand and across the British empire in the nineteenth century. Spanning the decades from 1840 to 1870, this major new history from Charlotte Macdonald places the New Zealand Wars within the wider framework of imperial power. It shows how conflict and resistance throughout the empire, from rebellion in India to the Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, were connected to the colonial project in New Zealand.

At the centre of this history are the thousands who served in the British military – from rank-and-file soldiers and bluejackets drawn from working-class Britain and Ireland, to officers from elite backgrounds who purchased their commissions. Their presence in New Zealand was vital to the imposition of imperial control, both during times of war and in the intervening years when the garrison underpinned a fragile settler economy and society.

Through rich archival detail and personal accounts, Garrison World traces the structures, experiences and legacies of military occupation. Acknowledging the impact on Māori communities and whenua, the book offers a critical and unflinching account of how imperial authority was imposed – and often violently asserted. This is a compelling and significant contribution to understanding the reordering of power that shaped Aotearoa in the nineteenth century.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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