History

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

The glorious monuments built in India by the Mughal emperors, from Babur in the early 16th century to Bahadur Shah Zafar II in the mid-19th century, have long deserved a comprehensive illustrated survey in one volume. George Michell is the ideal author. He is both a great scholar and a fervent communicator on many aspect of India’s cultural history. He has worked as a hands-on archaeologist on major Indian sites and recently established a Deccan Foundation to protect the wonders of that little-known region. He has been extremely well served in this magnificent book by the photographs of Amit Pasricha, who describes himself as a ‘panoramic photographer’. His photographs are

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver believed that the ideal British prime minister was a creature wholly exempt from joy and grief who applies his words to everything except to the indication of his mind. Swift’s dilation on the virtues of political froideur is only one of many ghosts evoked by Paul Bew’s riveting portrait of the man who seemed certain to be the first Irish prime minister of the Victorian age. In a characteristic confection of intimate portraiture and high-political history, Bew assesses the astonishing career of a lacklustre Protestant landlord who brought a Catholic populace to the threshold of parliamentary self-government in 1886. And ‘astonishing’ scarcely does justice to the political