If you click here you will get to History Today’s review of the top history books from 2015. As they put it themselves, “From Aristotle to El Alamein, via the Silk Road and Charlemagne’s vast empire, ten leading historians tell us about their best books from 2015“.
May I recommend John Robertson’s magnificent Iraq – a History.
As Eleanor Robson comments, “the past is irrevocably entangled with the present, as Tony Blair has reluctantly acknowledged through his admission that the 2003 Iraq War laid the roots of ISIS, the Syrian conflict and the international refugee crisis. Far better historians than Blair see the origins of Iraq’s current predicament in Britain’s crypto-imperial Mandate of 1920-32. But John Robertson’s magnificent Iraq: A History (Oneworld) takes a truly long perspective. From the first Sumerian cities over 5,000 years ago, via the great empires of Assyria, Babylonia and Abbasid Baghdad, to the modern Iraqi state, he shows how this complex past has always shaped, and been shaped by, contemporary political concerns.”
Happy Christmas,
Mr Kydd.
