Jonathan Sumption
The Third Reich at War (Allen Lane, £30) completes Richard Evans’s great trilogy on Nazi Germany. No one else has described so well how a populous, educated and urbanised society, with a strong legal tradition, succumbed to a movement directed by a comparatively small number of crude and philistine fanatics. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire (Allen Lane, £30) traces the German ambition to clear eastern Europe for colonisation by Germans, disposing of the indigenous inhabitants by mass murder and enslavement. One ought to resist the continuing obsession with the second world war. But it is not easy to do, with works of this quality hitting the bookshops. Those who want to be reassured that there are fine histories of other subjects should turn to The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England by John Styles (Yale, £25), one of the best works of English social history to appear for years. Styles has scoured contemporary novels, verses and paintings, memoirs, letters, newspaper advertisements, shop catalogues and price lists to recreate a whole world of dress-conscious working Englishmen whose existence most of us will not have suspected.
Caroline Moorehead
Alaa al-Aswany’s tale of life among ex-pat Egyptians in an American university is a delightful, entertaining novel about lust, greed, duplicity and ambition (Chicago, Fourth Estate, £14.99). Al-Aswany is a natural story-teller with a considerable comic gift and his ear for the tragic and his political passion give his work a sharp and uncomfortable edge.
Agnès Humbert was a member of one of the first Resistance networks in Occupied Paris. Arrested in 1941 and sent to slave labour in German factories for the rest of the war, she returned to France in 1945 to create a diary of the war years. Humane, perceptive and completely unsentimental, Résistance (Bloomsbury £14.99) is an extraordinary and little-told story.
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Hannü
December 20th, 2008 10:01pmDialogues Tibetan Dialogues Han is a travelogue from Tibet as well as a book of conversations with dozens of Tibetans from all walks of life in Tibet on a wide range of subjects - the Dalai Lama, polyandry, sky & water burials, the Muslims, the Han, Tibetan mastiffs, aweto, languages, thangka, Buddhism, independence and more.
Published this year, it is the most democratic and down-to-earth book to have come out of Tibet in decades.
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richard milk
December 7th, 2008 3:35pm'vim, gusto and enthusiasm' mr hensher? that wouldn't be a spot of tautology, would it? please stop the pompous posturing - it almost reads as badly as your books.
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Lisa B.
November 26th, 2008 8:37pmThere's an unsung little book out there, quite politically incorrect and one publishers appear fearful of backing. It's called "Up Dog Street" and seems to be available only on Amazon.com. This little tome seems to be slowly gaining a life and a following of its own and the unique, but timely theme, seems the reason. It's a story about an immigrant who's lived in England most of his life, but he spends his days pining for the tundra left behind and condemning the foibles of democracy We all know a few). The author has a powerful voice (an immigrant to America herself) and conveys the idea that birthplace and lineage mean nothing and that "nurture" is everything. It was a great joy seeing how the protagonist "Carlo" in this story, ultimately finds his English soul, from Sussex nontheless.All Western democracies have a lesson to learn from this story.
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