Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle is the first book for almost 20 years to focus on the visual work of poet-painter Isaac Rosenberg. It is also the first to explore his art in the context of his Whitechapel peers, including painters David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Jacob Kramer, Bernard Meninsky and Clare Winsten, and the writers John Rodker, Joseph Leftwich and Stephen Winsten.

A real-life murder mystery in turn-of-the-century London, and Scotland Yard’s “greatest detective of all time” who was determined to discover whodunit. By 1919, Det. Chief Inspector Fred Wensley was already a legend, having investigated the Jack the Ripper slayings, busted crime syndicates, and risked his life at the notorious Siege of Sidney Street. But the brutal murder of kindly fifty-four-year-old widow and shopkeeper Elizabeth Ridgley was an unexpected challenge in a storied career. Elizabeth and her dog were both found dead in her blood-spattered shop in Hitchin. But even in the early days of forensics, Wensley was stunned by the inept conclusion of local Hertfordshire police: it was a freak, tragic accident that had somehow felled Elizabeth and her Irish terrier. At Wensley’s urging, Scotland Yard proceeded with a second investigation. It led to the arrest of an Irish war veteran. The only real evidence: a blood-stained shirt. But the Ridgley case was far from over. Drawing on primary sources and newly-discovered material, Paul Stickler exposes the frailties of county policing in the years after WWI, reveals how Ridgley’s murder led to fundamental changes in methods of investigation, and attempts to solve a seemingly unsolvable crime.

Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature's emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in 'life' at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class—the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.

If Richard III had not charged to his death at Bosworth, how different might the history of Britain have been? Beginning in 1453 and ending in 1487, The Red Rose and the White provides a gripping overview of the bitter dynastic struggle for supremacy that raged between the houses of York and Lancaster for thirty years, culminating in the dramatic events on Bosworth Field in 1485. As well as offering a comprehensive account of the campaigns, battles and sieges of the conflict, the book also assesses the commanders and men involved and considers the weapons and tactics employed. Photographs, maps and portraits of the principal characters help to bring the period to life, whilst the fast-paced narrative conveys a sense of what it was actually like to fight in battles such as Towton or Tewkesbury the effect of the arrow storm and the grim realities of hand-to-hand combat with edged and bladed weapons. Skilfully weaving in political and social events to place the conflict in its context, The Red Rose and the White is a fascinating exploration of the turbulent period that would change the course of British history forever.

"Proceedings of the symposium "The Civil War in Art and Memory," organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, and sponsored by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. The symposium was held November 8-9, 2013, in Washington."