This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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In a year that has seen more history in the making than most, several outstanding books have come from our historians. Sir Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 (OUP, £25) upends almost everything the academic world thought we knew about the subject. 

Malcolm demolishes Foucault’s hitherto dominant distinction between sodomy as an act and homosexuality as an identity, offering instead a far more nuanced account of the evolution of same-sexual experience and its modes. It is rare to find such a combination of original and polyglot research, moral courage and crisply elegant prose. 

Sir Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849 (Penguin, £30) traverses well-trodden ground, but makes audible the voices of witnesses who had hitherto been drowned out — in particular, the women, often sharper and less partisan than their male counterparts. 

Clark loves contemporary parallels: “The storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 in Washington DC was thick with echoes [of 1848].” We can only hope that Europe’s “revolution of the intellectuals” (as Lewis Namier called 1848) won’t now be paralleled by America’s revolution against the intellect.

Intellectual history, sneered at in Oxford 40 years ago, is all the rage there now, whilst Classics is perhaps less prized than it was. One of the few books to combine both is The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present (Allen Lane, £30) by the Oxford classical historian Oswyn Murray. Somewhat gratuitously, he prefaces his book by giving his prime ministerial pupil, Boris Johnson, a piece of his capacious mind. But The Muse of History soon broadens into a tour d’horizon of what Aby Warburg called “the afterlife of antiquity”, a mosaic of memory evoking the scholars who unearthed and embodied the classical cosmos.

If there were a Nobel Prize for biography, it would be dominated by the British. But some of the best practitioners in English hail from elsewhere. Rüdiger Görner, who until recently held a chair in London, has produced two superb biographies this year. In the Future of Yesterday: A Life of Stefan Zweig (Haus, £25) re-examines the life of the peripatetic Austrian writer and his unique elegies to the “world of yesterday”, the pre-1914 Belle Époque. 

And for those who read German, Görner’s Bruckner: Der Anarch in der Musik (Paul Zsolnay, €32) celebrates this most private of composers in his bicentennial year. Always sublime in his music, Bruckner occasionally made himself ridiculous in life by proposing to almost every girl he met. 

Like one of the prisoners in Fidelio, Adam Zamoyski emerged from house arrest in Poland, the land of his ancestors, with a superb new book about one of them: Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess (William Collins, £25). This is not only a vivid portrait of its subject, Princess Izabela Czartoryska, but of her age, from Rococo to Romanticism. Over a lifespan of nine decades, in the course of which she met everyone from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, shared confidences with Marie Antoinette and had Chopin play for her salon, Izabela emerges as a supreme survivor. 

With our third Anglo-Polish grandchild, another Isabella, being born in Wrocław this year, I was struck by the parallels between the fate of Poland in Czartoryska’s era, thrice partitioned by predatory neighbours and that of Ukraine today. The Poles were twice erased from the map of Europe over the past two centuries and only regained full independence a generation ago. Yet they never gave up hope. If Ukrainians are to expel Putin’s hordes, they will need their own Izabelas to preserve their sovereignty, civility and civilisation.

A woman doesn’t, of course, have to be a princess to defend Western civilisation against its enemies. Joanne Rowling has shown real valour in standing up to the assault on women in the name of gender identity politics, especially in Scotland. The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht: Voices from the Front-line of Scotland’s Battle for Women’s Rights (Constable, £22), edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, includes a sterling essay by J.K. Rowling, “Wheesht for the Witch-Burners”. She writes: “In a sense, of course, all courage is absurd … Ultimately, I spoke up because I’d have felt ashamed for the rest of my days if I hadn’t.” Thank God she did. 

No less valiant, and blessed with an impish irreverence, is David Goodhart. In The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality (Forum, £25), he dares younger generations to do something really radical: start a family. He wants care for children, the disabled, the sick and the old to be valued by society as a public, not merely a private, good. Politicians drone on about GDP, but Goodhart demands a different kind of growth, arguing that “internally generated population growth similar to the baby boom years would restore the national balance sheet”.

Another useful guide for those perplexed by our culture and its discontents is Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Allen Lane, £25) has already persuaded many schools to ban smartphones. Haidt is no Luddite, but he articulates the perils of unlimited digital technology for the unformed mind. Two Nobel laureates this year were British pioneers of AI; still, when it comes to this particular kind of sorcery, even the masters are apprentices.

A.N. Wilson’s Goethe: His Faustian Life (Bloomsbury Continuum, £25) is a brilliant but paradoxical book. The author makes huge claims for its subject, as the omniscient seer who invented, or at least foresaw, the modern world. Yet he argues that Goethe was also “a wild man, obscene and out of control, foul-mouthed, coarse and alcohol-fuelled”. 

No doubt Goethe was indeed as capable of being both genius and monster as his Faust (“two souls dwell — alas! — in my breast”). Wilson does not quite resolve the paradox and Goethe remains an enigmatic, elusive figure. His dying words were: “More light!” This biography does at least try to illuminate the callous colossus.

Finally, let me recommend an important booklet by Brian Griffiths: Inflation Is About More Than Money: Economics, Politics and the Social Fabric (forthcoming from the Centre for Enterprise, Markets and Ethics, £17.99; and, full disclosure, it is based on essays that first appeared in TheArticle, the online platform I edit). 

Rachel Reeves is Britain’s mistress now, but she and her former colleagues at the Bank of England seem to have learned little from the mistakes that unleashed the post-pandemic inflation. Our new Chancellor is unlikely to find Lord Griffiths’ slim volume in her Christmas stocking — more’s the pity.