Reviews

The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom by David Woodman looks beyond the empty tomb to find perhaps the most consequential monarch of the Anglo-Saxon age.

In The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole’s America: A Tale of Manhood, Sex, and Ambition in the Civil War Era, Michael deGruccio discovers a generation betrayed by the fight for freedom.

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet by Edward Luce and Henry Kissinger: An Intimate Portrait of the Master of Realpolitik by Jérémie Gallon reveal the parallel lives of the Cold War frenemies.

In Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea, Luka Ivan Jukic makes the case for Mitteleuropa as a time that land forgot.

The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Joad Raymond Wren looks to the 15th century for the birth of the press.

The Invention of the Eastern Question: Sir Robert Liston and Ottoman Diplomacy in the Age of Revolutions by Ozan Ozavcı offers the ‘sick man of Europe’ a second opinion.

The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court by Breeze Barrington looks beyond the warming pan to the real Mary of Modena.

In The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 Jonathan Healey holds Juntos and ‘jittery times’ responsible for England’s slide towards civil war.

Though his relics are reviled, his impact is more keenly felt than ever. Can The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes by William Kelleher Storey find the man for our time?

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookal and Mirta Muñiz, collects the works of Cuba's ‘Apostle of Independence’.