Calt is an academic and an expert on the history, culture and language of The Blues – the black American music of the first half of the 20th century. After an introduction setting out his purpose and intentions for the book, and an extensive bibliography, the Dictionary itself is 270 pages of definitions, explanations and quotes from source materials.

To save you the trouble of reading it yourself I can summarise it as follows:-

a verb: to have sex;

a proper noun: the name of a musician, a preacher, a dance, a railway train, a riverboat or a sexual activity;

any other noun: a person, a type of liquor, part of the human body (especially a part involved in any sexual act);

an adjective: a skin colour, an intensifier or a word used for emphasis;

an adverb: adverbs are uncommon in the dictionary.

It’s quite good fun to pick up the book and browse a few pages now and again, especially when you come across one of Calt’s rants against any of his academic foes.

The subtitle of this book is “Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World”. It presents a series of case studies supporting the author’s belief that what we think is ‘history’ – what we think we know about the past – is inevitably partial, incomplete, and coloured by our own perceptions of ourselves and others. As English puts it, it’s “how we deliberately misremember the past”.

Whether it’s the family stories of what Grandad did in the War (which war doesn’t matter), or the popular belief that what we call ‘curry’ came to the British Isles in the waves of migration in the mid-20th century, or that Winston Churchill really did say many of the witty aphorisms attributed to him, the story or myth takes on a life of its own and becomes ‘true’ simply because enough people believe it to be true.

This is a timely analysis, as claims about Britain, its place in the world and the heroes it honours have polarised the country. Right wing politicians deplore the toppling of a statue to a slave trader, saying such actions attempt to “rewrite history” and “cancel” Colston, or Cecil Rhodes, or whoever, while at the same time they vilify the National Trust for acknowledging that many of the properties in its care exist because of money made through slavery. Lies told to win the Brexit referendum and the subsequent departure of the UK from the EU have become unassailable truths in many people’s minds.

There are no easy or obvious solutions to these problems but awareness of them, understanding how they came about and how they permeate popular debate should at least be a starting point.

The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

The stories of the lives of these five women have one thing in common: they show how desperately hard life was for working-class women in mid-Victorian times, and how easy it was for their lives to spiral into hopelessness. Focusing on the victims and their lives, Rubenhold barely touches on their final fates and to the annoyance of some ‘Ripperologists’ she ignores completely the unanswered question of the identity of their murderer.

The stories are both fascinating and heartbreaking. Rubenhold presents each as a novella, combining a novelist’s narrative style with detailed historical research and social commentary, making each one a compelling read. Inevitably there is speculation; when historical detail is lacking the novelist fills in the picture: “it is possible that …”, “X would have believed …”, “The most plausible explanation is …” and so on. This is not a criticism; I never felt that Rubenhold had overstepped her role as biographer for the sake of maintaining the narrative. The stories she tells are entirely credible, and the words used by other reviewers – gripping, haunting, eloquent – are fully justified. Lucy Worsley‘s summary: “The Five will leave you in tears of pity and of rage.”

This neat little book by freelance Oxford historian Liz Woolley picks out a couple of dozen of Oxford’s Victorian and Edwardian industrial and commercial buildings, many of which still survive today. If you didn’t know where four of the city’s breweries used to be, where the original railway station was (not where the present one is), or why there’s a crane on the Head of the River pub’s riverside terrace, this is the book for you.

The buildings are grouped into three easy walks complete with their own map.

This is a moderately heavyweight and academic account of the development of news media in Europe over the 15th to 18th centuries, but it is not dry or sterile. It describes the changes in spoken, written and printed transmission of ‘news’, illustrated with reference to the major and some minor historic events of the times.

At the start of the 15th century, and for a long time before then, secular and religious rulers and merchants relied on messengers, envoys and travellers for reports of what was happening outside their domains. For most people who could not afford access to such networks news spread slowly by word of mouth, proclamation in town squares and marketplaces, gossip and songs in taverns. Travellers were avidly quizzed – “What news?” The status of the messenger was important in judging the reliability of the news he brought.

Around this time or a little earlier the rich and powerful in some parts of Europe could subscribe to manuscript newssheets, ‘avvisi’, duplicated by copying by hand and distributed via the vagaries of messengers taking their chances on the roads. In one form or another avvisi lasted into the eighteenth century before finally giving way to the emerging dominant media, the newspaper.

The arrival of printing in the mid-15th century gave an easier and cheaper way of duplicating newssheets and over the next hundred years more and more people could afford either the terse unembellished reporting of received news of the manuscript or printed newssheets, or the more lurid and illustrated broadsheets sold for a few coins to the general public.

The first printed newspapers appeared in Germany and the Low Countries in the early 16th century. Their spread was closely tied to the growth of postal networks across Europe, which Pettegree documents in detail. The Thirty Years War and the English Civil War were the catalysts of a swift growth of the early newspapers in the first half of the 17th century, and the American War of Independence and the French Revolution similarly boosted the development of this medium at the end of the 18th century.

Throughout the period the printed press was heavily regulated, and publishing was an occupation which could easily land the publisher in trouble. Governments and rulers only wanted good news stories, and the canny printer would practise a fair degree of self-censorship in return for a lucrative monopoly granted by the state. The varying degree and nature of regulation in different parts of Europe, together with the different pace at which postal services (also regulated) grew meant that new media spread at remarkably different rates in different countries.

By the end of the period Pettegree covers, the periodic newspaper – daily or twice/thrice weekly – was establishing itself as the dominant medium for the dissemination of news. It was to hold this position for at least a century and a half before newer technologies – the telegraph, railways, radio, television – challenged its supremacy. Our appetite for ‘news’ is a great as ever but how we get it is changing, just as it has always done.

I’ve been getting a bit behind with my project to record – however briefly – the books I read so this is no more than a quick note. In lieu of a review, here are a few things you might not know about life in England in the year 1000.

• Anglo-Saxons in the year 1000 were as tall as their counterparts today.
• Women could own, manage, bequeath and inherit land and property.
• Surnames were not yet in use.
• Times of famine were not uncommon and put severe strains on the social system, to the extent that infanticide was not classed as a crime in such times.
• The silver penny was the standard unit of currency. Coins were only legal tender for a few years before they had to be returned to one of many local mints for recycling on a nine-for-ten basis, the 10% tax helping towards the cost of maintaining the system and the integrity of the coinage.
• Roughly 10% of England’s population was living in towns – meaning there was a sufficient agricultural surplus to support them, and sufficient wealth generated in the towns to buy life’s necessities.
• Although July was the month of hay-making it was also the time of greatest hardship in the countryside, as food crops planted in the spring were not yet ready to harvest. This time of year has been dubbed "the hungry gap".
• Spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, runner beans, potatoes, and tomatoes were unkown, as were sugar, tea, coffee, and chocolate.

I like this book. It’s easy to read – "accessible" I think the publishers would say – but obviously well-researched with plenty of references and a full bibliography. It’s ideal for a journey – read a few chapters, put it down, pick it up again half an hour later, read another chapter or two. You get the idea. So it gets the thumbs up from me.

A book that’s as enjoyable to look at as it is fascinating to read. Hockney convincingly argues his case for the widespread use of optical aids by artists from the 15th century onwards.