Reviews

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.

In Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain, Judith Flanders explores the commercialisation of grief and those who resisted the era’s conspicuous consumption.

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm is an ambitious comparative study that raises plenty of questions.

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature by Abigail Williams argues that misunderstanding popular literature was a sign of its success.

Guido Alfani’s As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West explores how history’s wealthiest men made their fortunes, but says little about why they did so.