A taste for the lurid, macabre and gruesome is not readily admitted in the Georgian drawing rooms of Lanark. On the outside chance that there is one person harbouring a furtive taste for some of life’s juicier details, let me introduce you to this work of history by Lisa Appignanesi (http://lisaappignanesi.com/), Trials of Passion. The author examines the […]
It’s an ingenious, if risky, premise to propose to tell the story of a single season in a single year that will somehow illuminate the character of a nation. Other years have their own popularity – 1922 as the ‘year of modernism’ perhaps, or 1963 as the year ‘sex began’ (according to Philip Larkin). Narrowing
One Summer: America 1927 Read More »
Dr. Neil MacGregor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_MacGregor and http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/management/directors/neil_macgregor.aspx and ), http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jan/02/neil-macgregor-british-museum-history Director of the British Museum, offers this sumptuous history of Germany through objects and art. Whilst Germany’s past is too often seen through the prism of the two World Wars, this book investigates a wider six hundred-year-old history of the nation through its objects. It examines the key moments that
Germany: Memories of a Nation Read More »
This appealed to me because it deals with the 5 years immediately preceding my birth. What was going on as I lay ‘mewling and puking’, uncomprehending of the world around? David Kynaston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kynaston) offers this whopping 880 page social history to set the scene. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period in their own right: neither
Modernity Britain: 1957-1962 Read More »
Andrew Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Roberts_(historian)) would be the first to point out that there are already thousands of studies of Napoleon already in print (the British Library catalogue lists 13,000 items with the word ‘Napoleon’ in the title field). It takes some guts and ambition, therefore, to seek to add to that number. Fortunately we’re in the hands
Napoleon the Great Read More »
100,000 years ago, at least six species of humanoid inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Homo Sapiens. How did our species survive and prosper up to the position we hold today? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Read More »
This month I’m only going to make one suggestion. It is Tom Devine’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Devine)(http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/history-classics-archaeology/about-us/staff-profiles?cw_xml=profile_tab1_academic.php?uun=tdevine) monumental 720 page history of Scotland – ‘The Scottish Nation‘. As I write there are 23 days to the referendum which will decide if Scotland remains in a union with the rest of the UK. This will unquestionably be the most historic
The Scottish Nation by Tom Devine Read More »
Fancy some classic history writing? You couldn’t do better the The History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) by William Hickling Prescott. This gripping chronicle draws upon the firsthand accounts of eminent 16th-century captains and statesmen to relate the overthrow of the Inca empire by the conquistadors. Historians admire Prescott for his exhaustive, careful, and
The History of the Conquest of Peru Read More »
Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama and http://legacy2.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama) prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. The
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama Read More »
