Rough Riders

by Peter Doyle (The History Press, 240 pages, £20) Featuring more than 200 unpublished letters from Frank and Percy Talley of the 1st City of London Yeomanry – the regiment also known as the Rough Riders – this book from military historian Peter Doyle describes the pair’s training in England as well as their experiences in Egypt, Suez and latterly Gallipoli where the brothers were separated but continued writing home not knowing if the other had survived the notorious battle. If the Cath Kidston-styled nostalgia of TV Sewing Bees and Bake Offs have whetted your appetite for retro home-making, then this work by social historian Virginia Nicholson may give you a clearer insight of what life was really like to be a housewife in the 1950s where the flipside of the consumer boom was lived under the threat of nuclear disaster and in an economy still struggling with the after-effects of WW2.