This week in Books

Birdcage Walk

Dunmore’s latest novel, set in 18thcentury Bristol, is part Gothic romance and part study of 1790s radical politics. It lays bare the life of a distinguished (fictional) writer, Julia Fawkes, as seen – mainly – through the eyes of her wilful daughter, Lizzie, who intends to marry a sexily dour property developer. There is a precision to Dunmore’s reenactment of the past (anaesthetic-free childbirth, for example), but she also shows the devastating effects of historical events on ordinary people and how they shape them.

Martin Luther

It is 500 years since Luther made public his stinging attack on the Catholic Church and famously (although probably apocryphally) nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenburg. It would be easy to see him as a fanatic, but this thoughtful new biography enhances the view that Luther stumbled onto his own Reformation and never intended to create a new form of Christianity. Indeed, Stanford even credits with him with the development of “liberty, human rights and secularism”. Noel Malcolm

Hitler’s American Model

This well-timed book argues that the Nazis looked to America when writing their race laws. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that the US paid obeisance “to the characteristic volkishe conception of the state”. Whitman suggests that, despite joining the war in Europe to defeat fascism, the US was obsessed with maintaining its republican system of government, believing that its freedom should be white and European. Tim Stanley