Europe

This wise, thoughtful and entertaining book draws on a lifetime of knowledge to tell the story as crisply as possible of the European continent and its people. Beginning in the Ancient World and ending with the war in Ukraine, Europe: A New History is both the story of the whole land mass and of the shifting points when a particular country or region has become dominant or extraordinary. The book is both a reliable and thoughtful guide to what has happened to this small western outcrop of the Asian landmass and a meditation on what is and what is not Europe - how this has changed but also the strange continuities. Europe: A New History is above all extraordinarily useful - Roderick Beaton is as good at writing about the great social, economic and climatic changes across the continent as on those small individual moments where suddenly history takes a new and sometimes drastic course.