Rana Mitter

At a time in current affairs when understanding China and the Chinese mindset has become imperative, Roel Sterckx’s Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Cook Ding (Pelican) brilliantly shows us the origins of that country’s thinking. This account, by a leading scholar of traditional Chinese philosophy, analyses the major figures and shows how their viewpoints contrast (for example, Mencius as a believer in innate human goodness, while Xunzi and Han Feizi are sure that humans are basically bad), as well as considering how true it really is that China is still a Confucian society.

A rather later Chinese thinker is at the heart of Julia Lovell’s monumental Maoism: A Global History (Bodley Head), a book that examines the mammoth influence of Chairman Mao not just in his native China but around the world, from Left Bank Paris to the mountains of Peru. It shows what a genuinely transnational impact his radical, violent political vision had.

Bloodshed also sits at the heart of Jason Webster’s Violencia: A New History of Spain – Past, Present, and the Future of the West (Constable). A lyrical account of Spanish history across the centuries, Webster’s book has the rhythms of a tune played out on a guitar in the hot sunlight. Its confident, well-paced prose is as much a pleasure as the wealth of knowledge about Spain it provides, on topics from the Inquisition to the civil war.

Rana Mitter is the author of Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press)