Emerald Guile

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Paul Bew has achieved the near impossible: he has somehow written a book on an important aspect of Winston Churchill’s statecraft that is totally comprehensive, genuinely ground-breaking and yet capable of being read in an afternoon. In a life that has been trawled over literally thousands of times

Raiding History

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

The problem with iconic events is that myths stick to them like Velcro. Consequently, historians who write about them often have to expend as much energy writing about things that did not happen as about things that did. Frederick Taylor is used to encountering this problem. In one of his previous books, about the bombing […]

Carving Up the East

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

The Ottoman Empire came to a definitive end in two stages in July and October 1923. An international treaty defined the boundaries of a new country called Turkey, which in turn declared itself a republic. But five years earlier, everyone in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, knew that the old regime was already done for. In […]

iPod Therefore I Am

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Frank Trentmann begins his dazzling book on consumption with the improbable assertion that the ‘typical German owns 10,000 objects’. I look anxiously around my flat and, even allowing for the quantity of read and unread books, the shirts, ties, sweaters, shoes and socks, the cups, spoons and crockery, the CDs, the knick-knacks and the rubbish, […]

Run, Writer, Run

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

I’m a lecturer in Victorian literature, so when people hear that I’ve been working on a book about running they’re usually a little bemused. First, I have to reassure them that I’m not writing a history of the activity but instead investigating what running can tell us about the body, the environment and the way […]

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