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From the ice age to the Cold War, from Reykjavik to the Volga, from Minos to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Davies here tells the entire history of Europe in one single volume. The narrative zooms in from the distant focus of Chapter One, which explores the first five million years of the continent's development, to the close focus of the last two chapters, which cover the twentieth century at roughly one page per year. In between, Norman Davies presents a vast canvas packed with startling detail and thoughtful analysis. Alongside Europe's better-known stories - human, national and international - he examines subjects often spurned or neglected - Europe's stateless nations, for example, as well as the nation-states and great powers, and the minority groups from heretics and lepers to Romanies, Jews, and Muslims. He reveals not only the rich diversity of Europe's past but also the numerous prisms through which it can be viewed.… (more)
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It is amazing how rotating a map of Europe 90 degrees clockwise, so that Europe is on the top and Russia and the rest of Asia on the bottom, completely changes one's perspective. How I used to think of the Scandanavian countries to be the outlying nether regions from the perspective of the central and southern European nations, is the same as how all of Europe is an outlying nether region to all of the people to the east.
(I originally posted this in Group: History Fans
Topic: What are your favorite history books? Hope this is alright.)
The book has many 'capsules', self-contained essays on topics not central to the main thrust of the historical narrative but illuminating nonetheless. These can be accessed throughout the book by a sort of typographical hyperlink and they do not necessarily correspond to the chronological sequence of the text where they first appear.
The overall effect is one of comprehensiveness. This book is essential reading for anyone who thinks that there is something special about 'Britishness' (or any other sort of '-ness', for that matter). It shows that one way or another, we in the UK are all European, no matter what our origin.
The book assumes that you haven't been sleeping through history class at school so will not spoonfeed you basic history.