What makes a state? Is it its people, its borders, its government, or does it rest on recognition from international powers? Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the process by which states have been created and recognised has taken many forms.
Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s by Thant Myint-U captures the optimism and ambition of Burma’s bridge between worlds.
‘What is the most common misconception about my field? That “anarchic” and “fanatical” Poland was partitioned by its more “enlightened”, “tolerant” absolutist neighbours.’
Parliament’s champion of the people or scandalous, self-serving politician? Georgian radical John Wilkes kept a foot in both camps.
The dismissal of a government scientist over the unproven battery additive AD-X2 galvanised the American scientific community in the 1950s.
The release of government documents related to the Kennedy assassination will keep scholars busy for years, but will we learn anything new?
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.
