The city of Paris is not exactly an under-exposed subject. Still, Colin Jones’ history of the city deserves a special place on the shelf, the best single volume I have yet read on the evolution of this most beloved of world cities.
My father first introduced me to Alan Furst’s moody, evocative novels of interwar Europe. I devoured the first of them three years ago, and since then have held myself to a careful ration, not reading too many too fast, for fear of running out.
Rob Roy is the British “Birth of a Nation.” It is an adventure story told against the background of a dreadful civil war — in this case, the Jacobite uprising of 1715 — by an artist who idealizes the losers’ culture and the victors’ cause.
Wells is one of Canada’s shrewdest — and certainly its wittiest — observer of electoral politics. His book on the past two years of Canadian political maneuverings lives up to his high standards.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, the tutor Miss Prism instructs her student Cecily to omit “The Fall of the Rupee” from her reading in political economy.
After Adrian Goldsworthy’s outstanding biography of Julius Caesar, the chronologically minded reader will almost inevitably next turn to Anthony Everitt’s Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor.
I cannot remember when I read a public policy book that has made more of an impression on me than Minxin Pei’s China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy.
It all started in China. It was here in the 1930s and 1940s that the United States was first presented with a dilemma that has recurred again and again over the decades since.
Jonathan Manthorpe, a journalist who has covered China and Taiwan for the Vancouver Sun and other newspapers, has written the supremely useful single volume history of Taiwan, from its pre-Chinese Malay-Polynesian origins to the present day.