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Dominion by Tom Holland

Tom Holland (Tom Holland – About | Hachette UK (tom-holland.org)) is an award-winning historian, biographer and broadcaster. He is the author of Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic (2003), which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Persian Fire (2005), his history of the Graeco-Persian wars, […]

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Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel 1917-2017 by Ian Black

Since the attack of 07 October 2023 on Israel (2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel – Wikipedia) the conflict in Gaza has dominated the news. As of 03 January 2024 at least 22,185 Palestinians have been killed and at least 57,000 injured by the Israel Defence Force since October 7. The death toll from the October 7

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Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra

The latest outpouring of resentment and anger happens to be in Chemnitz in eastern Germany (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fear-and-loathing-in-neo-nazi-chemnitz-cvzmw52fx), but it’s only an example of what’s cropping up all over the world. In this case, something truly horrible – the resurrection of the fascist far right in Germany – should set all sorts of alarm bells ringing. What

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Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann

Many of us have watched costume dramas about the Tudor period. My favourite image is of Charles Laughton scoffing a whole chicken carcass in the 1933 film The Private Life of Henry VIII (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024473/) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4tOb9J7W2k). More recently there has been the TV drama series ‘The Tudors’ (2007-2010) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758790/). These, combined with school history reading, have fixed

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