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The Economists are peculiar people. They all recognise the importance of consumption, but most seem loath to discuss the details.
It is one of the unfortunate realities of the twentieth century that the list of defining world political leaders is shared between those whose actions resulted directly in the greatest number of deaths and those who led the defence when their actions impinged on the rest of the world.
A distinguished historian of British strategic decision-making in the Great War, David French has now turned his attention to the British army in the Second World War, a shift in focus already signalled by a number of journal articles that have appeared over the last few years.
Despite over ten years of research on the German Democratic Republic since the fall of the Wall, there has been remarkably little work on 'ordinary East Germans', and so Mark Allinson of Bristol University is to be congratulated on his pioneering contribution.
The average historian steps with some trepidation into the murky territory that lies on the borderlands of philosophy and literary criticism.
With 'The Korean War' Peter Lowe returns to the subject of the 1950-53 south-east Asian conflict which he argues could have flared up into the third world war of the twentieth century (see also Peter Lowe 1986).
This, Rebecca Spang's first book, is the well-merited recipient of the Thomas J. Wilson prize, awarded by Harvard University Press to the best book it publishes in a given year.
Much of the very best synoptic writing on the medieval medicine of any country has, in recent decades, been elicited by the English evidence. The tradition goes back to C. H. Talbot's Medicine in Medieval England of 1967.
Any would-be anthologist of Edmund Burke, even if he or she is content to rely solely on published items, has a huge body of material from which to choose for inclusion in a single volume. A fair amount was published in Burke's own lifetime.
Few areas of historical enquiry resonate with such contemporary relevance as the Arab-Israeli conflict, and any scholar attempting a book on the subject is walking into a politically charged minefield. Historians enquiring after the 'truth' are accused of partisan bias: after all, they must either be supporters of Zionism or the Arab cause.