ROLLER-COASTER
EUROPE 1950-2017
IAN KERSHAW Allen Lane, 704pp, £30, Oldie price £19.91 inc p&p
‘There is very little thrilling or surprising in Kershaw’s bland, split-screen account of the evolution of Western and Eastern Europe (until the fall of the Berlin Wall reunited the continent), partly because Sir Ian, a leading member of the Anglo-German Left Establishment, has too omniscient a view to convey the grubby realities of business, the media and politics after a lifetime in the academy. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm gets four times as many mentions as the Sun, the most widely read newspaper in Britain,’ wrote Michael Burleigh in the
Evening Standard. Another failing is that ‘attempts to insert individual testimony as to how something felt at the time are far too cryptic to be effective, as the witnesses lack any explanatory context’.
Richard Aldous, the reviewer for the Irish Times, took note of the beige cover, without illustration, and suggested that ‘the publishers seem to have gone out of their way to suggest that the book’s primary audience will be reluctant undergraduates taking a dreary compulsory module in postwar European history. That’s a shame, because this fine book, while not as obviously thrilling as Tony Judt’s earlier Postwar (2005), has a number of interesting things to say’ and Kershaw ‘writes elegantly and without jargon, which these days is rarer than it should be’.
However, Aldous thought it odd that Kershaw fails to ‘confront head-on the role that the EU has played in undermining the very ideals it purports to serve. Not least of these issues surrounds the social contract and the nature of democracy itself.’