VERY little of Caroline Foley's new history of allotments is actually about allotments - and that's quite deliberate. The author's declared aim in Of Cabbages and Kings (Frances Lincoln, £20) is to remind us that allotments, like many valuable things, were "immensely hard to gain but would be so easy to lose."

Foley goes back as far as the Norman conquest to show how the people of this country became landless and have spent the centuries since struggling to regain the common land of which they'd been dispossessed.

Along the way she provides as lively and concise an account of the Peasant's Revolt as I've ever read - along with the Swing Riots, various enclosures and two world wars - before focusing on the current era and the allotment revival of the 21st century.