History

In an age when the merely mildly curious believe they can get all they really need to know from Wikipedia for free, A. N. Wilson’s fellow literary professionals must take heart from his expectation that there is still possibl to charge for a work of such succinctness that it is essentially an extended Wikipedia entry enlivened by some opinions. Wilson’s Hitler: A Short Biography (Harper Press, £14.99)certainly trumps Wiki for stylistic brio and brims with the author’s customary zip and zing. Inevitably few of the insights are especially original, but they are punchily delivered, particularly regarding Hitler’s early bone idleness and his modish, rather than outlandish, belief that science had

The Spanish Holocaust is a book that will give readers nightmares: it gave me two in a single night. Even people who think they have read enough about the Spanish Civil War to feel inured to its horrors will still be appalled by the intensity of the cruelty and repression here revealed. ‘Of the folly and wickedness of the military rising’, wrote Gerald Brenan in The Spanish Labyrinth, ‘there can today be no two opinions.’ Nor today, more than 60 years after he wrote those words, can there be two opinions about the sadistic and merciless repression planned and perpetrated by General Franco and his conspirators.  Reading Paul Preston’s narrative

Like the dyslexic Faustus who sold his soul to Santa, the life of John Dee was a black comedy of errors. His vain and vulgar efforts to harness the occult for material ends often rendered him ridiculous. But there is a darker tale in Dee’s work for the Tudor state: a story of dodgy dossiers, fear-mongering and greed. During the Tudor period no clear distinction was made between science and magic. John Dee’s study at Cambridge of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy enabled him to become a navigational consultant, who worked with England’s greatest explorers. But it also helped him measure the rays of celestial virtue that emanated from the stars

Why in 1737 did Dr Johnson choose to leave his home in Lichfield in the Midlands and travel to London to make a fresh start as a writer, asks Jerry White in his encyclopaedic portrait of the 18th-century capital. It’s a good question. London was dangerous, it was dirty, you could die of ague in a matter of hours, be robbed, crushed to death by the mob, thrown into jail for unpaid debts, and, no matter whether you were rich, poor or of the middling sort, suffer the scourge of bed bugs through every waking hour. To live comfortably (without domestic cares) you needed to earn enough money to employ

Britain’s links with the Continent were once  deeper and more extensive than those of any other European country. Paris, Rome and German universities played as vital a role in British culture as many native cities. Mediterranean connections were especially strong. Most cities on its shores contain an English church and cemetery. From Minorca to Cyprus, there are few Mediterranean islands that have not been occupied by British troops: the oldest company in Beirut is Heald and Co., the shipping agents (est.1837). Blue-Water Empire aims to tell the story of ‘the British in the Mediterranean since 1800’: 1800 is the year that Malta, soon to be the headquarters of the British

Sam Leith on Tony Judt’s rigorous, posthumously published examination of the great intellectual debates of the last century When the historian and essayist Tony Judt died in 2010 of motor neurone disease, among the books he had planned was an intellectual history of 20th-century social thought. As the disease robbed him of the ability to write, his friend Timothy Snyder proposed making this book — out of the edited transcripts of a long conversation they would conduct over several weeks in 2009. The book-as-conversation is, as Snyder points out in his foreword, a rather Eastern-European artefact. That’s apt to its content: Snyder is a historian of the region. Judt has

This absorbing book is — in both format and content — a much expanded follow-up to the same author’s very successful pictorial anthology Lost London of 2010. It replicates some of the photographs that appeared there and contains many new ones, all in captivating detail. The photographs are ones of record. There is little sense of artful composition or a striving for special effects. Many are of great beauty in their direct simplicity, as though the images were breathed onto the page with no human intervention. But of course the presence of a photographer with his cumbersome equipment in a slummy alley or dead-end court was bound to attract attention;

One hundred and fifty years after Anglo-Saxon England was invaded by the Normans, Anglo-Norman England was invaded by the French. On 21 May 1216 King Philip Augustus’ eldest son, Louis the Lion, landed at Stonor on the Isle of Thanet, kissed a crucifix, planted it in the ground and began an 18-month war for the English crown. He had been invited to England by a group of barons who wished to replace King John as punishment for repudiating the terms of Magna Carta. The war Louis waged, although ultimately unsuccessful, was a damned near thing. Sean McGlynn’s new book calls this England’s ‘forgotten invasion’, although in recent years Hollywood has