‘The Emperor and the Elephant’ by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby review
The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby surfaces Umayyad and Abbasid perspectives on their Frankish frenemies.
The Emperor and the Elephant: Christians and Muslims in the Age of Charlemagne by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby surfaces Umayyad and Abbasid perspectives on their Frankish frenemies.
Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement by Susannah Gibson makes a case for 18th-century proto-feminism. Do the Bluestockings fit?
The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo explains how Hungary came to play a key role in the collapse of communism.
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff refutes the claim by Virginia Woolf, that the women of Tudor England left only empty bookshelves.
How Finland Survived Stalin: From Winter War to Cold War by Kimmo Rentola argues that political guile as much as military might stopped the Soviets in their tracks.
Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War between Science and Religion by Michael Taylor revels in the tangles of Victorian thought.
As Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO and NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance make clear, at almost every point in the last 75 years the alliance's future has looked uncertain.
Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce is a tender study of European rural life. But is this lost past closer than we think?
Two very different volumes, Sparta and the Commemoration of War and The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae, grapple with the myth of Sparta.
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck brings Southeast Asia’s ‘invisible revolution’ into the light.