Book review – History
A myth is as good as a mile
We live in disenchanted times. We barely do God, most of us don’t do magic and frenzied consumerism occupies our…
Hero or collaborator?
Simon Baron-Cohen wonders whether the humane Hans Asperger may finally have betrayed the vulnerable children in his care in Nazi-occupied Vienna
The brutal mask of anarchy
In September 1939 Britain went to war against Germany, ostensibly in defence of Poland. One big secret that the British…
Red for danger
‘Gentlemen prefer blondes,’ Anita Loos pronounced, ‘but gentlemen marry brunettes.’ Quite what they do with redheads she never revealed (and…
Another near run thing
Charles VI of France died on 21 October 1422. He had been intermittently mad for most of his long reign,…
Monster of misrule
Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in…
Venerable father of English history
It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when…
Caves of ice
Modern civilisation depends on refrigeration — but we have been trying to manufacture cold for at least 4,000 years, says Michael Bywater
Lost horizon
Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…
The end of secrecy
Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable…
Lovely house of ill repute
Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust…
The real theatre of war
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
The hardest man of all
From the unpromising and desperately unforgiving background that forged his iron will and boundless ambition, Temujin (as Genghis Khan was…
Carrying on regardless
This big, bristling, deeply-furrowed book kicks off with a picture of the British countryside just before the second world war.…
Licence to kill
One morning in March 1921 a large man in an overcoat left his house in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to take a…
Guardians of an ideal
The French have always favoured grand, elegant abstractions about the human condition, says Ruth Scurr. It’s part of their national identity
Awfully arrayed
John Keegan, perhaps the greatest British military historian of recent years, felt that the most important book (because of its…
Some animals are more equal than others
Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb.…
The forgotten faithful
It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so…
Only the lonely
This book starts with a Chinese boy so privileged and pampered that, at 21, he can’t open his own suitcase,…
Something sensational to read on the train
Readers who have put in some time on the railways may remember the neat, brush-painted graffiti that appeared in 1974…
Beautiful, bedevilled island
The Arabs invaded Sicily in the ninth century, leaving behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. In the Sicilian capital of Palermo,…
There’s no substitute for human intelligence
Spying may be one of the two oldest professions, but unlike the other one it has changed quite a lot…
Striking Middle Sea
The Mediterranean has always been central to European civilisation — and a source of drama and conflict, says Anthony Sattin
It takes a thief…
In the words of one of his contemporaries ‘a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes’, the…
