Book Review: The Woman Who Shot Mussolini: Frances Stonor Saunders - Faber and Faber (London  2010). 375pp
This is an unusual book.  It deals in detail with a dramatic (if overlooked) historical event and offers a thoughtful treatment of insanity in the early 20th century.  In the excellent first chapter we are treated to a [...]

Book Review: Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith In Beijing (Verso: 2008)
Giovanni Arrighi argues convincingly (in Adam Smith In Beijing) that we are seeing the end of the most rapacious social and economic system the world has ever known. What he calls ‘destructive capitalism’ is, he argues, a peculiarly Western form of accumulation that has almost destroyed [...]

Book review: ‘Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century’ by Sheila Rowbotham (Verso, 2010)
This inspiring book examines how women challenged many aspects of public and private life between the 1880s and 1920s, in Britain and in the USA. They did so from different positions in the political spectrum, as liberals, socialists [...]

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2010) Paperback £9.99 stg.
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People, an academically minded historical work that nonetheless spent nineteen weeks on the bestseller list in Israel, is a book that is much more incendiary than it ought to be. Sand’s basic thesis – that [...]

The writing of history, and the reception of historical works, reveals quite a lot about the values of a given society. I have written before about the often explicit political character of historians’ interpretations of the French Revolution and this applies not only to the twentieth century but also to the period in which the [...]

The Invention of Paris, A History in Footsteps: Eric Hazan | Verso (2010) pp400 (£20)
There are few cities in the world as indelibly branded, in both a commercial and a figurative sense, in the minds of people as Paris. This is all thanks to a handful of iconic monuments made famous from millions upon millions [...]

The following is my translation of an article by Tasos Iliadakis, first published on January 25 2010 in the daily paper ‘The Country’ in Crete.

- all those who forget the past cannot have a future
A. The background
During the early 1940s, Berlin, in order to have financial means of securing its strategic objectives in the Balkans, [...]

Fordlandia: the rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city by Greg Grandin, Metropolitan Books, New York 2009
This book uncovers the complex history of Henry Ford’s attempt to create a secure source of natural latex in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1920s and ‘30s.  But it also reveals the complex and often contradictory character [...]

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies, by Andy Beckett. Faber and Faber, 448 pp.
About a quarter of the way into Guardian journalist Andy Beckett’s impressive account of Britain in the 1970s, self-satisfied Labour Party politician Denis Healey, who served as Harold Wilson’s chancellor of the exchequer, observes that he knew “bugger [...]

Roger Casement’s life does not fit neatly into one book.  As the child of a mixed marriage his early years are an account of rural Ulster life in the late 19th century.  His encounters with the vicious exploitation of rubber workers in the Belgian Congo and South America are tales of moral courage and physical [...]