Book Review

A speedy dash through two millenia of european history - a lot to admire; and a lot to mourn.

It has to be said that school history usually only allows us to dabble into small chunks of history - often disparate and lacking in cohesion. The author himself bemoans the fact that history syllabuses "maintain that history is better taught in depth than breadth... Depth should follow breadth". His aim then, is to introduce us to to a broad brushstroke version of the history of a relatively small corner of the globe. By the end of the book you won't fully understand the political tides that have pushed Europeans in and out of alliances, divisions, treaties and wars. But you will have a much better idea of how influential ideas, philosophies, actions and reactions have cascaded across the various regimes that have wielded power; how ordinary people have managed to exert an extraordinary influence on their monarchs and politicians and how ordinary people have been sacrificed as states exert their national identities.

I love the fact that Simon Jenkins starts his history with a myth... the starting point of all things depends on tales told by firelight, with truths hidden in a symbolism no longer fully understood. But it is apposite in this book to start in this way - these stories and the philosophies carefully worked out by those early Greeks who believed in the mythological gods, still underpin our understanding of what it is to be european.

The saddest thing about summarising European history in this way, is the realisation of quite how often we have all been fighting each other. And quite how often these wars have just been to satisfy a whim, or an ego-trip, of one person or a small group of people. Deciding to go to war doesn't appear to be a path chosen democratically, even if the leader was a democratic choice - it seems to be a positioning of politics that ends in a fight when posturing finally plays out. The utter futility of the napoleonic campaign in Russia, where 500 thousand french soldiers and 400 thousand russian soldiers died - out of a total of one and a half million soldiers - beggars belief... until you read that a little more than 100 years later, nine million soldiers died in the campaigns of the Great War; and then just thirty years after the end of that warthere were as many as 55 million war related deaths in World War 2. The brevity and summarising of history in this way, inevitably brings a focus to such terrible statistics. And more shockingly of all, the fact that Europe continues to be a fractured and argumentative place.

Not to say that Simon Jenkins focuses purely on the battles. There is a celebration of achievement, from Egyptian pyramids to the amazing mediaeval cathedrals, and I particularly liked the idea of Vikings sailing to Athens, and marking their presence by carving dragon-like runes on to the marble lions guarding the harbour at Piraeus.

To say that an attempt to summarise all of this in around 400 pages is foolhardy is an understatement. There will always be people ready to complain about what's been left out and what's been included. But this book doesn't set out to be a major analysis of our history, nor does it intend to enlighten us as to the social history of the European tribes.

My biggest criticism is that overall it becomes a bit of a list - and unfortunately I felt that Simon Jenkins reading of his work contributed to this sense of a list. The writing is descriptive and engaging, but on occasion he didn't seem to take pleasure in delivering it. Nonetheless I feel it is a vital listen for all Europeans who don't have the time to read weightier tomes.

I listened to A Short History of Europe by Simon Jenkins on the xigxag app.