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Lead book review

The history of Ukraine — from Herodotus to Hitler

Serhii Plokhy's work explains how this vast, once distant steppe between forest and sea is now regarded as ‘the Gates of Europe’

9 January 2016

9:00 AM

9 January 2016

9:00 AM

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine Serhii Plokhy

Allen Lane, pp.395, £25, ISBN: 9780241188088

At the beginning of the historical record, the lands that we now call Ukraine were a reservoir of fantasy. Achilles probably did not sail from a Greek port on the north of the Black Sea up the rapids of the Dnipro River to find his final resting place, as some Greeks once believed.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £20, Tel: 08430 600033. Timothy Snyder is the Housum professor of history at Yale and the author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

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