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As the title of the first volume under consideration asserts, France is currently in the grip of a divisive and destabilising phenomenon. Guerres de Mémoires, or wars of memories, are currently wracking the land, calling into question national identity and even challenging the hallowed Republican model.
Frédéric Bozo’s book on French foreign policy around German unification in 1990 is a superb work of contemporary diplomatic history.
It is rare to review a book that was published nearly 60 years ago. It is also a privilege, because Sir George Hill’s last volume in his four-volume A History of Cyprus is considered by most historians of Cyprus as the starting point for both students and scholars of the Ottoman and British periods (until 1948) of Cyprus’ past.
Wasteland with Words is a very welcome addition to the small number of academic books about Iceland’s modern history available in English. The few other works on modern Icelandic history are largely written in Icelandic for local consumption.
Scholarly research on the Holocaust, carried out in many disciplines but especially in the field of history, is dynamic and constantly progressing; several giant leaps in its expansion can be discerned, mainly since the end of the 1970s.
Penelope Fitzgerald’s historical novel The Beginning of Spring, set in Moscow in 1913 but written at the height of perestroika, conveys an ambivalence familiar to those of us who spent time there during the Gorbachev years.
To write a general history of two neighbouring countries spanning 100 years is no easy task. Furthermore, in 1905 Norway became independent of Sweden, meaning that there was no natural linkage between the two, geography apart.
In the beginning was Hitler.
This book is more than just a history of the German-Jewish communities before and during the Holocaust. It is also part memoir, part impassioned response to the National Socialists’ ‘destruction of a civilization’. This breadth, though, should come as no surprise. For the book’s author, the late John Grenville, was himself a Holocaust survivor.
‘He was one of the best National Socialists, one of the strongest defenders of the German Reich, one of the greatest opponents of all enemies of the Empire.