Reviews

In Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, John Blair proves that you can’t keep a good corpse down.

The Diver of Paestum: Youth, Eros and the Sea in Ancient Greece by Tonio Hölscher – and translated by Robert Savage – searches beneath the surface for the meaning behind a beguiling fresco.

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs: A Biography by Adam Sisman is a detailed portrait of that voluminous chronicler of Victorian things.

Mary Chamberlain’s groundbreaking oral history turns 50. This new edition of Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village invites reflection on half a century of change.

More than science waiting to be understood, The Medieval Moon: A History of Haunting and Blessing by Ayoush Lazikani illuminates the enchanted orb of poets.

They go low, we go lower. The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain by George Owers offers up the origins of Britain’s fractious political culture.

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.