A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE
FROM PERICLES TO PUTIN
SIMON JENKINS
Viking, 354pp, £25
Writing in Prospect, Zoe Apostolides commended Simon Jenkins’s ‘engrossing aerial view of a continent’, A Short History of
Europe, noting its fairly up-to-the minute trajectory from the Minotaur to Brexit. Apostolides reckoned that Jenkins had delivered ‘an ambitious work that maintains a relentless momentum…peppered throughout’ with ‘counter-intuitive takes’, for example a surprisingly glowing report card for those fearlessly creative entrepreneurs, the Vikings.
At the Scotsman Allan Massie was less receptive to Jenkins’s breakneck pace and louring blind spots. ‘Some will rightly find it odd, even ridiculous, that there is no entry for “Christianity” in the index…jenkins is not at ease in the Middle Ages, and gets through the medieval centuries as briskly as he can.’ For Massie, Jenkins presented the limited viewpoint of ‘a 20th-century liberal… his attitude to the Reformation is “why couldn’t they be reasonable?”’ Observing that Jenkins with certain exceptions upbraids authoritarians and warmongers, Massie had a little
further fun at the expense of Jenkins’s extraction: ‘Like most English (and Welsh) historians he has a soft spot for the ghastly Tudors.’
It was left to Dominic Sandbrook at the Sunday Times to interrogate Jenkins’s definition and remit regarding Europe itself. ‘What is Europe? It’s a harder question than you might think…sometimes it includes Britain, sometimes Russia, sometimes even Turkey.’ Nor will it do, Sandbrook insisted, to speak of Europe as a philosophical rather than geographical concept – ‘What about Uruguay, a Spanish-speaking former colony…with one of the most democratic and tolerant political cultures in the world?’ While considering Jenkins’s perspective Anglocentric and his composition tangibly hurried, Sandbrook conceded the results were ‘impossible to dislike…if you are looking for a Christmas present for a teenager who has never heard of Peter the Great, the Borgias or the Crimean War, this is the book for you.’