New Books in British Studies

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Yaron Matras about his new book Speech and the City . In this timely book, Yaron shows that cities can provide an important counter-weight to political polarization by forging civic identities that embrace diversity. The book traces the emergence of a city language narrative that embraces and celebrates multilingualism...

There is a widespread sense throughout the developed world that progress towards a better society has stalled. Many countries, including the UK, have experienced persistent economic stagnation accompanied by declining trust in institutions. Governments are struggling to respond not only to traditional economic problems but also to newer challenges posed by climate change, migration and technologic...

Since time immemorial, water has been a major theme in myth, religion and folklore throughout the world. With its 12,000-mile coastline, as well as a plethora of rivers and lochs, Scotland is a particularly rewarding place in which to explore the spiritual dimensions of what is both the most commonplace and yet the most mysterious of all chemical compounds.  Liquid Faith: Scotland's Sacred and Su...

What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe: A New History (Allen Lane, 2026), award-winning historian Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as never before—as the history of an idea, and a collective identity. Since its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, 'Europe' has been defined, and redefined, by its people. T...

Drawing from local archives alongside national and international records, War and Governance in Scotland, 1543-1559: Destruction, Reconstruction and Reform (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Amy Blakeway argues that warfare was the defining feature of government and politics in Scotland for the two decades following the death of James V. It demonstrates that beyond the direct effects of invasion, the nee...

Ganja is the popular name in Hindustani, Bengali, and other South Asian languages for intoxicating substances produced from the plant species Cannabis sativa L . Starting in the eighteenth century, British India's colonial administrators sought ways to systematically tax and govern how ganja circulated from the farms of peasant families in rural Bengal to pipes, plates, and cups elsewhere in the s...

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) talks with Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri, the editors of Palestine in Transition: Frank Scholten's Visual Archive of the British Mandate Period . They discuss who Frank Scholten was, the breadth and depth of the images he took in Palestine, and the archival holdings themselves. You can browse Frank Scholten’s images here . Follow the Cit...

 Nuclear Archipelago: Secrets, Power and the Biggest Atomic Blast in Australia  (NewSouth, 2026) tells the shocking story of the two British atomic weapons test series held at Western Australia's Monte Bello Islands in 1952 and 1956. Operation Hurricane and Operation Mosaic took place at a rugged archipelago 100 kilometres off the Pilbara coast, and each of the three bombs sent fallout over vast...

Descended from Mughal nobility, Akhtar al-Nisa Begum Nawab Sarbuland Jung grew up in Hyderabad in southern India, where she lived a quiet, private, and privileged life at the heart of the state's royal court. In 1896, at the age of 20, she married Nawab Muhammad Hamidullah Khan Sarbuland Jung, a prominent lawyer and the scion of a leading Muslim reformist movement. In 1909, the wealthy couple...

Today’s guest, Caro Pirri, is the author of Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book explores how early modern colonial travel writing informed the London theater’s spatial and placemaking conventions. It suggests that what the stage found most compelling about narratives of colonial settlement was their failure...

Hindu nationalism is transforming India as an increasingly dominant ideology and political force. But it is also a global phenomenon, with sections of India’s vast and influential diaspora drawn to, or actively supporting, right-wing Hindu nationalism. Indians overseas can be seen as an important, even inextricable, aspect of the movement. This is not a new dynamic—diasporic Hindutva has grown ov...

Life Writing and the End of Empire: Homecoming in Autobiographical Narratives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) examines how autobiographical writing reflects the psychological and cultural afterlives of the British Empire. Rather than treating decolonization as a completed historical moment, Emma Parker shows how empire continues to haunt personal memory, identity, and ideas of home. Through close read...

Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton. Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII (Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particular...

"In my home country, they call me a 'bornfree'." Simukai Chigudu was born in Zimbabwe, two years after the end of its bitter war of liberation - a war in which his father had fought. This is the story of his childhood journey through the chaos of that new country's birth to Britain, where he arrived alone, a teenager, burning with ambition but utterly lost in ways he had yet even to discover. Told...

Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922–1932 (Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Elizabeth Darling is about the architecture and design of broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s, examining the buildings which the BBC occupied in its founding decades, with a particular focus on Broadcasting House in London. It argues that these environments were as constitutive of the C...

Roger Bowdler and Brent Elliott’s The British Cemetery: Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture , published by Historic England (2026), traces the history of the cemetery from the 17th century to the present day. The cemetery emerged as a new landscape form in the 19th century in Britain but had deep roots in earlier churchyard practices and in fashionable garden landscape design. Cemeteries very quick...

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Nabi Sahak about his book, Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics, 1893–1947: The Durand Line Unmasked  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Anglo-Afghan Power and Politics revisits one of the most contested borders in the modern world. The roughly 2,640-kilometre line drawn in 1893 by Mortimer Durand and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, which today divides Pashtun comm...

City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London (Yale UP, 2026) uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts – from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slan...

Today’s guest, Matthew Ritger, is the author of Houses of Correction: Carceral Institutions and Humanist Culture in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026). This book delves into the archival records of Bridewell, Europe’s first house of correction, which was overseen by the humanist reformer Richard Grafton. It makes the case that the Bridewell prison and workhouse were central to the h...

Since the inception of the Secret Service Bureau back in 1909, women have worked at the very heart of British secret intelligence - yet their contributions have been all but written out of history. Now, drawing on private and previously-classified documents, leading historian Claire Hubbard-Hall brings their gripping true stories to life in  Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Inte...

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, sh...

From disability metaphors to narratives structured around bodies presented as aberrant, early medieval English thoughtworlds conveyed the promise of resurrection and the hope of salvation through crip and disabled bodies. Light of the Everlasting Life: Disability and Crip Eschatology in Old English Literature (U Michigan Press, 2025) argues that early medieval Christian eschatology, as manifested...

Born in 1102, Empress Matilda combined the blood of two dynasties: the house of Wessex and their conquerors, the dukes of Normandy. As a widowed German empress, she was named as heir successor by her father, Henry I. But, after his death in 1135, Matilda’s place on the English throne was usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Civil war followed, and she ruled the south-west of England in opposit...

Fear of the False: Forensic Science and the Law of Crime in Colonial South Asia (Cornell University Press, 2026) uncovers colonial South Asia's critical role in the development of forensic science. Around 1900, the government of British India created a web of institutions for the scientific detection of crime. Driven by anxieties about "native mendacity," newly minted forensic analysts focused on...

Many of us have watched the classic 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia, the somewhat fictionalized work based on the life of T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt and the First World War. But Lawrence was part of the Arab Bureau, an effort to better understand and influence the region as Britain fought the Ottoman Empire for control of the Middle East. Chastened by their intelligence failures at Gallip...