Reviews

Significant works reviewed by Engelsberg Ideas writers.

A new housing estate, 1930.
Review

Gardens for all

The transformative impact of suburbia on the British landscape between the wars is often viewed in negative terms. But the development of the suburban garden is indivisible from th..

Mathew Lyons July 10, 2024
Pre-Great War Austrian soldiers watching a pageant.
Review

The Habsburg world we have lost

The Habsburg monarchy’s political culture persisted in odd and varied ways, following the disintegration of the Austria-Hungarian state. The failures and mendacity of the succeedin..

Luka Ivan Jukic July 9, 2024
The Great Wall of China and the Yellow River in the Tengger desert at Shapotou near Zhongwei, Ningxia Province, China
Review

One family’s Chinese Odyssey

The clan saga is a common theme in Chinese literature and, in a new memoir, a journalist returns to his family's homeland and the history of China's turbulent 20th century.

Michael Sheridan July 8, 2024
The Battle of Sandwich on 24 August 1217.
Review

The medieval moment when England emerged from France

During the early years of the 13th century, Philip II of France tried to take the crown of England from a troubled and unpopular King John. The war that followed marked a crucial m..

Nicholas Morton July 2, 2024
A poster of Joseph Stalin, 1944.
Review

The true sources of Soviet conduct

The Soviet Union believed that they were manifestly destined to lead the world to a higher future yet that masked a profound insecurity about their status in the international orde..

Rodric Braithwaite July 1, 2024
A German commemorative stamp of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Review

Nietzsche’s Italian connection

After his death, Nietzsche's work was mutilated by malign editing, imprecise interpretation and forever associated with 20th-century fascism. The German philosopher owes his more n..

Hugo Drochon June 26, 2024
US Infantry marching along railway lines during the Russian Intervention, 1918-20.
Review

How not to fight a war in Russia

The Allied Intervention into the Russian Civil War contributed to America’s inter-war isolationism and intensified the Soviet Union's paranoid fear of encirclement.

Christopher Silvester June 26, 2024
Cartoon of the Holy Alliance from 1823.
Review

The Holy Alliance was doomed to be brittle

The history of the 19th-century Holy Alliance between the monarchist great powers of Austria, Prussia and Russia shows how hard it is to maintain complex federal systems in a world..

Michael Ledger-Lomas June 24, 2024
Six wives of Henry VIII.
Review

Six Tudor lives in their own right

Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr were distinct and individual women, each compelling in their own right, and not ..

Mathew Lyons June 20, 2024

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