Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re-enter society after a long and unexplained absence. The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in incidental details. Replete with episodes of manic religion and delusions, the world in Sweet England is hard, dark, and dangerous. Exploitation and violence provide a steady background glow that illuminates Jack's relationship with Brenda, with whom he is living, drinking, brawling, and loving. Weiner's London is equally a protagonist of his story. Dirty, sombre, the city is a palimpsest, the contemporary curry houses and mosques reinscribing the landscape dotted with old churches, monuments and graveyards that invoke old England's Christian saints and glorious past. Phantasmagoric and allegorical, and told largely through dialogue, Sweet England's vision will haunt the reader long after they put down this compelling book.

Sweet and Clean? challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over thirty years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature, revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient's linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practiced. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases-plague, smallpox, and typhus-that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?