Reviews

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce is a tender study of European rural life. But is this lost past closer than we think?

Two very different volumes, Sparta and the Commemoration of War and The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae, grapple with the myth of Sparta.

Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World by David Van Reybrouck brings Southeast Asia’s ‘invisible revolution’ into the light.

In Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain, Judith Flanders explores the commercialisation of grief and those who resisted the era’s conspicuous consumption.

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm is an ambitious comparative study that raises plenty of questions.

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature by Abigail Williams argues that misunderstanding popular literature was a sign of its success.

Guido Alfani’s As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West explores how history’s wealthiest men made their fortunes, but says little about why they did so.

On the centenary of Britain’s first Labour government, three recent histories cast a sympathetic eye over Ramsay MacDonald’s nine months in Number 10.

Pacy and even-handed, Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass is unlikely to be bettered as a portrait of the Tokyo trials.

American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs by Wes Davis falls short of examining the consequences that followed the wanderlust.