New Books in British Studies

Today I’m speaking with Mike Lane, Managing Director and co-founder of WeBuyBooks about the economics of the second-hand book business. WeBuyBooks is one of the UK’s largest second-hand book dealers. Mike talks about how he got his start in the book industry, which books sell and which don't, and what the future holds for the book industry more broadly. Mike also discusses other second-hand busine...

Anniversaries provide opportunities to take stock and reflect. It is now ten years since voters in the United Kingdom cast their ballots in a referendum on whether the UK should Leave or Remain in the European Union. The subsequent decade has seen much churn and change in British politics. Join Tim Haughton and guests Maria Sobolewska, Charlotte Galpin and Monika Brusenbauch Meislova for a discuss...

In the Middle Ages, hell was useful because it was vaguely defined. Canonical scriptures scarcely mention hell, leaving much to the imaginations of early Christians, who used it to sort out who belonged within the faith. Translating hell: Vernacular theology and apocrypha in the medieval North Sea (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Stephen C. E. Hopkins explores how hell became a place for...

Imperial Science, the Organic Movement and the Path to Shangri La, 1900-1969 (UCL Press, 2026) is a global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US. Ashok Malhotra examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped dietary and agricultural research carried out in the 1920s in British India, from soil protect...

⁠Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain⁠ (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied, hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against museum experts to become a cultural authority. Previously overlooked as a pest with a dubious collection, this book us...

In this episode hosts Salman Sayyid and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by William Barylo to discuss his most recent book ‘Muslims in the Neoliberal Era: Resisting, Healing, and Flourishing in the Metacolonial Era’. The discussion centred on the differing nature of the Muslim experience in France, the UK, and beyond, and the ways in which Muslims find spaces and forms of community resistance in view...

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment have often been claimed for sociology. But, what does it mean to say these thinkers were sociologists, or at the very least precursors to the subject? Does it, for example, mean that intellectuals of 18th Century Scotland had the same concerns as we do today? Alternatively, does it mean we should think of sociology as an elite discipline, developed by men...

Was Brexit really a sudden, populist shock, or was the writing on the wall for decades? This week on International Horizons, Eli Karetny sits down with award-winning cultural historian Prof. Iain Quinn to discuss his forthcoming book, Cultural Dissonance: Brexit Reconsidered. Quinn dismantles the narrative that Leave voters were simply misled, arguing instead that the referendum was the inevitable...

Names are incredibly powerful things and are a crucial part of the way we see and classify the world around us. Plant names are especially fascinating in this respect. Some are simply descriptive or speak of ancient uses and remedies, whilst others have religious origins or roots in wider folklore, and some are very recent inventions. Scottish Plant Names: An A–Z (Birlinn, 2026) by Dr. Gregory Ken...

Castles speak. Especially in an age when they are no longer necessary. The Act of Union of 1800, which brought Ireland into closer association with Britain, challenged the status of Irish landed proprietors, and not a few responded by building castles. In Gothic: Building Castles in Post-Union Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2026) Dr. Judith Hill explores the projects of two Irish proprietors: the Bur...

What was life like for young people in twentieth century Britain? In We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026), Dr Laura Tisdall, a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University tells the story of this era through the eyes of children and young people, offering a radical reinterpretation of Britain’s Cold War age. The book offer...

At the dawn of history the Celts occupied a vast swathe of Europe from Ireland in the west to lands south of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. The study of this Celtic past has often been a disputed and debated territory and for centuries the true story of these Celtic-speakers of old was obscured by fanciful origin myths. Their origins and subsequent history were slowly revealed when linguistic studie...

Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026) is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of th...

Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works. Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions no...

Hotels represent nations, hosting visiting monarchs, politicians, and diplomats. Hotels underpin global networks of travel and communication, on which national and international prosperity have increasingly depended since the end of the First World War. Yet hotels are also places where people can be anonymous; where murderers and thieves mix with adulterers and con artists; and where prejudice fin...

Between 1857 and 1947, over 28 million Indians left the subcontinent to live, work and study elsewhere. Today, India has the largest diaspora in the world, with approximately 18 million Indians living overseas. Though often absent from historical narratives, migrant children were instrumental during the time of the British Empire in the development not only of Indian national and diasporic identit...

As detailed in The Japanese Garden: Ella Christie and Cowden (Birlinn, 2026) by Lucy Stewart, at the turn of the twentieth century, Scottish adventurer Ella Christie returned home from a trip to Japan inspired to build her own Japanese garden. As might be expected from a woman who thought nothing of travelling to the other side of the world in search of the unusual, Ella’s approach to developing t...

The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century–and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julia Stephens, the author of Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton UP, 2025), uses that archive of documents to try to piece together the stories of Indian migrants that traveled the empire throughout their live...

The history of medieval Britain through twelve remarkable illuminated manuscripts. Illumino: A History of Medieval Britain in Twelve Illuminated Manuscripts (Reaktion, 2025) explores the history of medieval Britain through the biographies of twelve remarkable illuminated manuscripts and of their creators and owners. The manuscripts each serve as portals into these lives and as springboards into th...

A major new look at Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe. Virgil. Chaucer. Petrarch. These names resonate with many as cornerstones of European culture. Yet, in Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (U Chicago Press, 2025), D. Vance Smith reveals that much of what is claimed as European culture up to the Middle Ag...

In Treaty Ground: Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty, from Roanoke to the Republic (U Nebraska Press, 2026), Professor Charles W. A. Prior offers a new account of the sovereign claims of Native Americans, the Crown, and colonies in early America, arguing that Native American diplomacy shaped how sovereignty was negotiated and contested among all three, from Virginia’s founding to the ratifi...

In this episode Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Alba Kapoor. Kapoor is the racial justice lead at Amnesty International UK and previously led the policy team at the Runnymede Trust. Alba Kapoor shared the cutting edge work that Amnesty International UK is leading around racial justice, the surveilling of black and brown communities in the UK through existing policy infrastructu...

Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White (U Minnesota Press, 2026) is an ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West. Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organiz...

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Johnson’s view largely prevailed until the late twentieth century, when it was challenged by a growing scepticism about the existence...

Why and how did Labour win the 2024 election? In The British General Election of 2024 Robert Ford, a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen Mary, University of London, Will Jennings, Professor of Politics at the University of Southampton, and Paula Surridge, Professor of Politics at the University of Bristol present a detailed analysis of th...