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Richard Whatmore’s readable (and sobering) The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis is also highly recommended, as is Richard Bourke’s masterpiece, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. In Flawed Strategy: Why Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions (Polity), Beatrice Heuser deploys her expertise refreshingly, including explaining where and why she has changed her mind. Richard Davenport Hines’s History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft (HarperCollins), informative and entertaining, is also a scorching critique of current history teaching. I have found that Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (Penguin) offers essential nourishment for a brain in danger of overload from the despair, stupidity, tragedy, and venality pervading world affairs.
The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume One: The Ancient World and Christendom (Encounter Books) is 1,200 pages of lavishly illustrated propaganda in service of Florentine supremacy. James Hankins has outdone himself with this book. Saul David, writer par excellence with over 20 significant volumes of military history to his name, in Tunisgrad: Victory in Africa(William Collins), shows us how this force eventually joined hands with Montgomery’s veteran desert warriors, making the defeat of Rommel’s Italo-German army group inevitable. The Great War has been much explored, but mostly through national lenses. In Ring of Fire: A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War (Bloomsbury), Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst David Chaffetz, author of Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires Josiah Osgood’s Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome (John Murray Press) returns to Cicero and the late Roman Republic, tracing the slow erosion of legal authority in a political culture that continued to speak the language of law long after its foundations had weakened. Both books illuminate the enduring tension between constitutional form and political reality. Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of Modern China Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers (Hodder & Stoughton) is a very readable history of Ancient Mesopotamia. Covering everything from magical beliefs to maths lessons, it introduces us to colourful characters including Buzuza, a dishonest merchant who encouraged his couriers to smuggle valuable goods in their underwear. No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One (Yale University Press) by the veteran naval historian Andrew Lambert, recalls an era when British diplomacy, in league with the Royal Navy, ruled the waves and brought almost a century of peace to Europe. That harmony came to an end in 1914, when Britain forgot to enforce the crucial Continental strategy of Wellington and, above all, the peerless Nelson. George Magnus, author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy Sumantra Maitra, author of The Sources of Russian Aggression Emma Ashford’s First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World (Yale University Press), coins the phrase ‘unbalanced multipolarity’, an appropriate description of the emergent lopsided order, not dissimilar to a post-Napoleonic Europe. It is thought provoking, and raises a few questions for middle powers, who are trying to find ways to navigate an order, where conquest, imperialism, and spheres of influences have returned. A similar theme is explored in The Return of Geopolitics and Imperial Conflict: Understanding the New World Disorder (Springer) – the clue is in the name – by Francesco M. Bongiovanni. Aside from those, I have been reading a lot about the Ottoman empire, and have recently re-read Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Basic Books), often unfairly maligned by the far-right, but a remarkable book and template for students of history, on how to actually successfully run a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan empire. The absorbing detail and ambitious scope of the evolutionary biologist Max Telford’s The Tree of Life: Solving Science’s Greatest Puzzle (John Murray) charts a scholarly but highly readable journey through the four-billion-year history of every species on earth, and the curious characters – in every sense – who probed the connections between them. Fitzroy Morrissey, author of A Short History of Islamic Thought Yet the ‘age of Hitler’ too, Ryrie argues, is now coming to an end, as Western societies increasingly lack any form of coherent moral framework. That last point was famously made by the late Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued that the problem of moral decline could be solved by a return to Aristotle via Aquinas. Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Penguin), which is not only the most readable and comprehensive history of Muslim slavery ever published, but also manages to be deeply humane without ever lapsing into moralizing presentism. Nicholas Morton, author of Mongol Storm Si Sheppard’s panoramic overview of the Ottoman Empire’s early centuries, Crescent Dawn: The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Age (Osprey). Frances Wilson’s elegant biography of Muriel Spark, Electric Spark: the Enigma of Dame Muriel (Bloomsbury) focuses on the drama of her early years – marriage to a violent paranoiac, divorce, poverty, love affairs and a dramatic conversion to Catholicism – and shows how these experiences provided the seedbed for her spikily original novels. The Letters of Muriel Spark (Virago) Solvej Balle’s brilliant timeloop septology, On the Calculation of Volume (Faber & Faber) David Priess, author of The President’s Book of Secrets Phillips O’Brien’s War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why(Penguin), a refreshing new take on the sources of national power, packed with challenges to readers’ assumptions about what makes countries ‘great’ in the international system. Joshua Rovner, author of Strategy and Grand Strategy Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Penguin). |
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