Engelsberg ideas

Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent into Total War, James M.

‘You see, we resisted’, the Finnish press officer who accompanied me on my first visit to Finland in 1977 told me, looking out over the Gulf of Finland, ‘they didn’t.’

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

‘It was with Coltrane’, wrote the English poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin, ‘that jazz started to be ugly on purpose.’

The nuclear industry has successfully commercialised nuclear power.

The announcement of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was advertised as the resurrection of an earlier pipe dream of an ‘Arab NATO’ mooted in 2015.

Russia’s parliamentary elections were held from 18 to 20 September.

The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25 By my desk I keep a copy of Plate 51 of the 1920 Times Atlas.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir hardly lacks admirers.

Concord, Massachusetts kindled two revolutions.

The annual opera festival at the Arena di Verona – an ancient Roman amphitheatre built around 30 AD to seat 30,000 spectators – is a sight to behold.

Sweden’s election last Sunday turned out to be much more of a nail-biting affair than most had expected.

On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy, Carlo Rovelli, Allen Lane, £20 85 Seconds to Midnight: A Physicist’s Argument Against Rearmament, Carlo Rovelli, Allen Lane, £9.99 Carlo Rovelli is now 70 and these two books have the air of closing a…

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy, Ben Macintyre, Viking, £25.

In the conventional narrative about decarbonisation, net zero is going to be achieved by building lots of wind farms and installing lots of solar; batteries are going to fix the intermittency problems when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow;

Aristotle: The First Teacher, Philip Freeman, Yale University Press, £18.99 Aristotle was born in Stagira, a small town in northern Greece, in 384 BC.

‘Do I contradict myself?

AI towers over us.

They would have been celebrating heartily in the Kremlin.

Sunday 13 September is election day in Sweden.

‘Handel was from Halle,’ the German comic folk musician Rainald Grebe once sang, ‘from Dessau there was Kurt Weill – it was, was, was once in style … that’s how Saxony-Anhalt is’.

The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society, James Marriott, The Bodley Head, £14.99 ‘Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were…

A little over two years ago, Suzanne Raine and I started the podcast Garlic & Pearls, in which we attempt to define Frenchness and Britishness by putting different expressions of our respective cultures through a crucible of comparison and conversation.

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

Hunting: The Pursuit That Shaped Humanity, Brian Fagan, Yale University Press, £25 On a misty January morning last year, I pedalled an old bicycle along a series of dusty tracks that criss-cross the wetlands of Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, eastern…

‘This government is fascist’, a high-level German official at the European Commission in Brussels told me last year.

Conservative Modernists: Literature and Tory Politics in Britain, 1900-1920, Christos Hadjiyiannis, Cambridge University Press, £29.99 One of the fascinating paradoxes of 20th-century literature is that the poets and critics who did the most to promote mo…

Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Make A Difference?

It is crucial to examine the chain of causality in any international event and, by now, it is obvious that the simultaneous crises in Ceuta and the Falklands are interconnected.

How England Began: From Roman Britain to the Anglo-Saxons, Nicholas Higham, Yale University Press, £25 ‘We always were English, and we’ll always be English,’ declares shopkeeper Connie Pemberton in the 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico.

One of the cultural events of this summer in France has been the huge success of two Pathé blockbuster films, collectively titled La Bataille de Gaulle.

Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System in the Middle East, Aimee M.

Staging Nuremberg: How the United States and the Soviet Union Fought Over the Portrayal of Nazi Crimes, Sylvie Lindeperg, Columbia University Press, £30 ‘The world must be convinced that we are right… If such a campaign fails it would be better that there…

The fog comes in silent waves.

China’s Global Strategy Under Xi Jinping, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, Oxford University Press, £22.99 The world view from modern China can be captured by an old map.

There’s been a lot of words spilt recently on the decline of reading and the losses incurred, such as a purported decline in concentration and IQ.

In this real-world version of Risk, the threat is obvious and ominous.

Since the spring, speculation has built up within Russia, and among Ukrainian officials and Western commentators that President Putin will order a renewed mobilisation call, probably following parliamentary elections in September.

The Japanese Way of Parenting: And What It Taught Me About Raising (Mostly) Calm, Caring, Capable Kids, Lisa Katayama, Workman Publishing, £16.99 Can Japan help me live better?

That the Middle East is hurtling towards a catastrophic Turkish-Israeli conflict has been apparent for a while.

Rex Juba: 15 Glimpses of an African King, Andrew Kenrick, Torva, £25 Juba II ruled Mauretania, to the left of Numidia (roughly equivalent to modern Algeria).

The Fraying Bonds of Peace: Economic Origins of the First World War, William Mulligan, Cambridge University Press, £35 John Maynard Keynes was not only a great and ground-breaking economist but also a stylish and skilful writer.

Lord Palmerston would not have dreamed that he might one day shape American diplomacy from beyond the grave.

De Gaulle: Résistance, the first part of Antonin Baudry’s biopic of the unlikely rise, fall and rise again of the great man during the early years of the Second World War, is built upon sound foundations: Julian Jackson’s magnificent biography, A Certain…

Women of SOE: A History of Their Secret Missions in Wartime Europe, Kate Vigurs, Yale University Press, £12.99 Before parachuting into German-occupied France to train the resistance, Jeanne Bohec, the only female explosives instructor to serve with Britai…

The desire to revise territorial boundaries through war, coercion, diplomacy, or some combination of the three, was a regular, if not normal, part of international political life before the middle of the 20th century.

David Hume died 250 years ago, on 25 August 1776.

The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom, Martha C.

Iranian-backed hackers are suspected of attacking water municipalities across more than a dozen US states earlier this month.