🚨An exciting day as CENTRAL EUROPE is officially available to buy across Europe and North America! It charts the unlikely rise, dramatic fall, and strange rebirth of that mysterious Central European world between France and Russia that has both enchanted generations of

And a reminder that I will be speaking about the book at the Summertown Library in Oxford tonight at 6pm so do come by if you’re based in Oxford!

A hard second, and I was the exact same way RE Ancient Egypt—Wilkinson made it truly legible in a way many smart teachers never managed. And I highly recommend going right into his follow-up, on the many geniuses of 19th and 20th c. Egyptology, which is even more enjoyable.

Bonus points for this awesome map, which is so simple but really puts into perspective what it meant that they were a totally Nile-oriented civilisation and not a Mediterranean-oriented one!

My essay on the strange and largely forgotten role of Pan-Slavism in the Second World War has been recorded into an audio essay by the good people at Engelsberg Ideas! I’ll post the link below, as well as to my last audio essay on the rise and fall of the political moustache👇

A natural follow-up for listeners of Dominic Sandbrook & Tom Holland‘s recent series on the First World War, which featured innumerable magnificent moustaches, and not coincidentally. The war was indeed the pinnacle of Europe’s militarised culture of often-outrageous moustaches,

My book about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is published today by Yale University Press!

This is a very good account of a frequently forgotten period (& is beautifully read) - do have a listen

I made fun of Croatia a lot yesterday, and obviously - very obviously - Croatia deserves it, but I'm still very excited that my copy of Luka Ivan Jukic's Central Europe arrived in Tbilisi.

An even more remarkable arc when you remember that six of Europe's seven remaining monarchs are descendants of Queen Victoria

Brushing up on nerd street cred