Donald Rayfield
Black Sea Battleground
Crimea: A History
By Neil Kent
Hurst 224pp £20
The Crimean Tatars: From Soviet Genocide to Putin’s Conquest
By Brian Glyn Williams
Hurst 217pp £20
Since the Crimean War of 1853–6 there has been little information for the English-speaking reader on Crimea’s history and peoples. Only the American scholar Alan Fisher has used the necessary Ottoman archives and other Turkic sources, but his writings, published in Istanbul in 1998, are not readily available. Putin’s annexation of Crimea, however, has induced Hurst to produce two brief monographs.
Neil Kent’s Crimea should be subtitled travesty, not history. Careless with facts and even spellings, poorly researched and biased, it was obviously not peer-reviewed before publication. Like Kent’s A Concise History of Sweden of 2008, this book omits crucial events, expands trivialities and abounds in errors. The Crimean War is allotted some thirty pages; the 350-year history of the Crimean Khanate, among Europe’s most influential and well-documented states, is allowed just twenty.
Kent begins with a whirl through Crimean antiquity. The ‘aborigine’ Taurideans (Taurians in Kent’s book), he tells us fancifully, have an ethnonym cognate with English ‘tower’. (What little we know of the Taurideans’ tribal names and skull shapes suggests they were Pontic, like the Circassians.) By 500 BC, Iranian nomads
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
It is a triumph @arthistorynews and my review @Lit_Review is here!
In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his success?
John Adamson investigates.
John Adamson - Love Island with Ruffs
John Adamson: Love Island with Ruffs - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
literaryreview.co.uk
During the 1930s, Winston Churchill retired to Chartwell, his Tudor-style country house in Kent, where he plotted a return to power.
Richard Vinen asks whether it’s time to rename the decade long regarded as Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’.
Richard Vinen - Croquet & Conspiracy
Richard Vinen: Croquet & Conspiracy - Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter
literaryreview.co.uk