KEVIN BRYAN reviews new releases by The Outlaws, Mark Radcliffe & David Boardman, Clarence White

Islamesque: the forgotten craftsmen who built Europe’s medieval monuments
Diana Darke, Hurst, £25
THIS is a wonderful book, fully and colourfully illustrated. Diana Darke is an Arabist and cultural expert who has lived and worked in the Middle East for over 30 years. She describes beautifully hundreds of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, palaces and castles.
She challenges the conventional wisdom that only Rome could be the source of Christian architecture. The accepted idea is that the “Romanesque” style simply emerged between 1000 and 1250 across the whole of Europe, making it the first pan-European architectural style since Imperial Roman.

WILL PODMORE welcomes the case put by a feminist, disentangling the abusive rhetoric of the trans rights debate

WILL PODMORE welcomes a timely and clear-eyed account of both Nato and Britain’s fatal role in the process that led to war in Ukraine

WILL PODMORE peruses a new history of the opening weeks of conflict between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
