Reviews

Long shorn of a shared faith and distanced from its classical roots, Europe: A New History by Roderick Beaton discovers a continent searching for a definition.

Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600 by A. Tunç Şen follows the fortunes of the sultan’s stargazers.

Mexico: A History by Paul Gillingham and A Brief History of Violence in Mexico by Pablo Piccato start from different places. Yet their neighbour to the north proves to be an inescapable destination.

Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity by Frank Dikötter is a balanced account of the violent years between Kuomintang and communist rule.

Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots by Roger Kreuz finds that copyright isn’t always a matter of black and white.

The Cancelled Prime Minister: The Extraordinary Rise and Tragic Fall of Ramsay MacDonald by Walter Reid finds the romance behind Labour’s great betrayer.

Compassion from the Kremlin often proved as short-lived as its critics. In Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991, Mark B. Smith finds that terror was a feature rather than a bug.

In Republic and Empire: Crisis, Revolution, and America’s Early Independence, Trevor Burnard and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy place the revolution at the periphery of the British Empire’s world war.

Runes: A Concise History by Tom Birkett looks beyond the mythical baggage to find a writing system no less remarkable and mysterious.

Rather than a catalogue of a fanciful past, Folklore: A Journey Through the Past and Present by Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook is a field guide to a constantly changing Britain.