BBC History Magazine

Tom Holland

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In Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979–1982 (Allen Lane), Dominic Sandbrook continues his brilliant history of modern Britain by taking us into the eighties, and the first years of Thatcher’s government. The political manoeuvrin­gs of 1979–82 are traced with a novelistic verve that would have done credit to House of Cards, but Sandbrook’s interests range much further afield than Whitehall and Westminste­r. Ian Botham, Simon Le Bon and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy all have starring roles. The entry under ‘Bowie, David’ in the index is worth buying the book for alone.

Less entertaini­ng, perhaps, is the index to Richard Stoneman’s The Greek Experience of India (Princeton) – but the book itself has no need of racy indexes to enthral the reader. The question of what influences Greeks and Indians might have had on each other in the centuries that followed Alexander the Great is one that has always simultaneo­usly fascinated and frustrated historians – so huge gratitude is due to Stoneman for shedding as much light on the issue as anyone is ever likely to.

Equally adept at illuminati­ng reaches of the past long lost to darkness is Mike Pitts’ Digging Up Britain (Thames & Hudson), which gives us 10 eye-opening portraits of recent archaeolog­ical discoverie­s. Yet the illuminati­on is always flickering, and what we have learnt invariably tantalisin­g. As Pitts puts it: “If we know anything, it is that there is so much more we don’t know.”

Tom Holland’s most recent book is Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Little, Brown)

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