Category History books

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The Revolutionists by Jason Burke review – from hijackings to holy war

A colourful study of the evolution of extremism in the tumultuous 1970s

No one knew what to call them. For some they were “skyjackers”, for others “air bandits”. Neither name stuck, but by 1970, these figures were fixtures of the western political landscape. It helped that hijacking planes was easy. Bag checks, metal detectors and frisking at airports were proposed, only to be dismissed as overkill.

The result was a lethal carnival of transnational terrorism that peaked in the 70s, when commandeering a plane was as much a rite of passage as backpacking to Kathmandu for some countercultural types. Spanning four continents and drawing on sources in a dozen languages, Jason Burke’s survey of this set combines a flair for period detail – sideburns and aviator shades, berets and Beretta pistols – with impressive digests of Arab and Iranian history.

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‘One of the oldest urban centres on the planet’: Gaza’s rich history in ruins

The territory’s ancient heritage has too often been ignored. As we mourn incalculable human losses, learning about its past can help us better understand the present

As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.

Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.

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Raise Your Soul by Yanis Varoufakis review – an intimate history of Greece

The colourful former minister uses the lives of five female relatives to tell the story of postwar Greek politics

Yanis Varoufakis entered public consciousness as the academic in a leather jacket who briefly became Greece’s finance minister in 2015. For having the temerity to lecture his creditors on the folly of austerity, he was treated as the villain of the piece. Yet for all his swagger, he has always been a surprisingly sober thinker: Keynesian at heart, internationalist in instinct, he has built a reputation as a critic of dollar hegemony and Fortress Europe, a defender of both the precariat and refugees. You wonder if he’s experienced some schadenfreude in watching Germany’s economic miracle go bad of late – an implosion largely brought about by administering to itself the austerian medicine it once prescribed to the Greeks.

His latest book, the 10th since 2010, departs from his usual sober fare. This time, he offers a collective portrait of five unyielding women in his life who, in their different ways, thumbed their noses at patriarchy and autocracy. Written after thugs beat him up in 2023 in what he described as a “brazen fascist attack”, this is a therapeutic enterprise that doubles as a counter-history of postwar Greece.

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On Antisemitism: A Word in History by Mark Mazower review – the politics of prejudice

This nuanced analysis of what ‘antisemitism’ means explores the evolution of anti-Jewish discrimination, and how it became a driver for political activism

Adolf Hitler’s defeat didn’t end prejudice against Jews in Germany or any other country. But the Third Reich did, in Mark Mazower’s judgment, “discredit antisemitism as a positive programme for decades to come”.

It is an arresting turn of phrase that makes reckoning with the Holocaust after the second world war sound more like a trend in public policy than a moral imperative. But that is the point. Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, is talking about a particular manifestation of anti-Jewish sentiment that rose and fell in a relatively short time frame.

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Domination by Alice Roberts review – a brilliant but cynical history of Christianity

The humanist historian brings objects to life beautifully, but falters when it comes to people and their beliefs

Domination tells the story of how a tiny local cult became one of the greatest cultural and political forces in history. Alice Roberts puts the case that the Roman empire lived on in a different form in the church.

It is not an original idea – after all the foundation prayer of Christianity says “thy Kingdom come” – but Roberts tells the story from the point of view of individual parishes and even buildings. It’s a revelation, like watching those stop-motion films of how a plant grows and blooms. There’s a section about how a Roman villa might transform into a parish, the long barn providing the footprint, the web of relationships providing the social connection, the very tiles and columns providing the building materials. I can’t think of anyone who writes better about the way objects can speak to us. There’s a passage here describing her joy on grasping what it means that an ordinary-looking clay lamp found in Carlisle is purple on the inside; there’s a beautiful afterword about the history of bells.

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Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi review – love, war and betrayal

Troubled by a photo of her grandmother living it up in Mussolini’s Italy, the author of Free delves into archive and memory to uncover the truth

It starts with a photo. A black-and-white image of a couple relaxing on a pair of sun loungers in front of a luxury ski hotel: him, squinting against the sun; her, smiling at the camera, wrapped in a white fur coat. It is their honeymoon in Cortina, up in the Italian Alps.

The year is 1941, and the woman is Lea Ypi’s grandmother. Ypi saw the picture after it had been posted online by a stranger, gone viral across Albania, and attracted a stream of abuse. “Morally degenerate” was one comment. “Fascist collaborator” another.

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A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries review – comfortably dumb?

From Shakespeare’s fools to Donald Trump, this exhilarating read considers stupidity in its many forms

Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.

In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.

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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in August

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

One of my favourite reads recently has been Childish Literature by Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a mixed-genre book of memoir, short fiction and poetry on the theme of parenting and new fatherhood, with lots of lucidity, humour and humility throughout.

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Plot Twist: I am related to the real-life Oliver

Oliver Twist is one of the author’s best known creations. But for Nicholas Blincoe, the story is much closer to home. He reveals an astonishing family history

For almost my entire life, I’ve known there’s a connection between my family and Oliver Twist. There’s little chance I could forget it. Charles Dickens’s story has exploded into an Oliver multimedia universe, with as many as a hundred screen adaptations, the brilliant Lionel Bart musical, two current TV shows based on the frenmity of Fagin and the Artful Dodger, and an Audible dramatisation starring Brian Cox and Daniel Kaluuya.

I remember one Easter Sunday we were watching Oliver! on TV when my father snapped out of his post-lunch stupor to announce: “Oliver Twist was a Blincoe. He’s my great-great-grandfather.” The original Robert Blincoe was a foundling, abandoned in London’s St Pancras district in around 1792. He spent his early years in the care of the parish, entering the workhouse at four years old. By seven, he was one of 30 “parish apprentices” contracted to work in a Nottinghamshire cotton mill without pay until the age of 21. London’s parish councils shipped thousands of pauper children north between the 1790s and 1830s, but little was known of their lives until Robert’s memoir. His account of brutality, sadism, sexual abuse and starvation became a national sensation, running to five editions between 1828 and 1833.

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Decolonizing Language by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o review – final words of literary giant

An exhilarating collection distills the late writer’s thinking on power, exile and the importance of the mother tongue

On 17 July 1979, the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o gave a speech in Nairobi in which he questioned the logic of an African literature in European languages. He had recently been released from prison, where he had been held after his critiques of corruption and inequality had touched a nerve among leaders of the recently independent nation. But his address provoked strong reactions for another reason: up until that moment, Ngũgĩ had been closely associated with the emergence of an African tradition of writing in English and acknowledged as a key figure in the rise of the novel as a major genre on the continent; his fictional work was often cited as an example of how English was being remade in formerly colonised societies. His early novels, from 1964’s Weep Not, Child onward, struck a chord with a global Anglophone audience partly because they echoed the English novelists he had read as a student at Makerere University College, the Ugandan branch of the University of London, and Leeds University, the seat of “Commonwealth” literary studies in the 1960s.

By the time of his speech, Ngũgĩ was a member of the literary establishment in Africa, a leading figure in world literature, and a leader in postcolonial thought. And while it is true that he had challenged what he saw as the hegemony of English in a 1968 manifesto, On the Abolition of the English Department, co-written with two of his colleagues at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ assumed that the abolition of English did not mean dispensing with the colonial language. In fact, for most of the 1960s and 1970s he shared a belief, common among the postcolonial elite, that a literature in the ex-coloniser’s language could indeed be revolutionary. But now the novelist had decided to break away from English, to depart, as he put it, “from Anglo-Saxon literature in order to reconnect to the patriotic traditions of a national and culture literature rooted among the people”. He would henceforth write in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ (known to Swahili and English-speakers as Kikuyu).

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