Books

Pains and pleasures of anticipation

The best sort of debut isn’t actually the author’s first book

Empire by way of Europe

A new book places the quest to keep Algeria French squarely at the centre of European integration

England’s fair and pleasant land

It’s not cricket; it’s the murky world of identity

Rich portrait of our island nation

Le Brun has written a study of Britain imagined, Britain as it recently was, and of Britain becoming

A window into the medieval mind

Heaven on Earth captures the extraordinary efflorescence of Gothic architecture in Europe

The man who tamed the Russian bear

Statesmen confronted a stupefying cacophony of crises in the 1980s

How to avoid the Third World War

Tucker marries an English School insight with the thought of two giants of philosophy

The British empire, for good and ill

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning offers the first serious counterblast against the hysterical orthodoxy

Rebadging the past as feel-good therapy

The discipline faces not so much a crisis of history, as a crisis of historicism

Two portraits of troubled art scholars

A pair of debut novels revive the serious business of art history