Reviews

Desk Revolutionaries: The Men of the French Directory, 1795-9 by Biancamaria Fontana sets the record straight on the French Revolution’s great experiment in governance.

The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan finds a continent powerless before a capricious United States. Is it too late to teach an old world new tricks?

The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity by Andrea Wulf brings the most enlightened of Enlightenment radicals into the mainstream.

On the Altar: A History of Sacrifice from the Sacred to the Secular by Jonathan Sheehan places bloodletting at the heart of Western thought. 

Fakers: A Top-Secret Tale of Phantoms and Forgeries on the Disinformation Front Line by Rory Cormac brings Britain’s shadowy Information Research Department into the light.

In The Shah’s Party and the Iranian Revolution That Followed Robert Templer reveals the hubristic high point of the Pahlavi regime’s self-regard.

A new translation marks the 50th anniversary of Carlo Ginzburg’s pioneering microhistory The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.

Charismatic Nations: A Cultural History of Nationalism in Europe from 1800 to the Present by Joep Leerssen looks to art and not politics for the birth of the nation.

This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz vividly reconstructs the world that produced Wuthering Heights. Are there limits to this approach?

Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English by Elisabeth van Houts is a sympathetic biography of the woman who would be king.