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The Best Books I Never Wrote

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[Originally published on Stuff.co.nz ] Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History In the 1990s postmodernism ran rife in academic history departments across the globe. Scholars supposedly committed to studying the past all too often denied the possibility of any meaningful knowledge of it. Richard Evan’s robust and concise defence of history as a discipline tasked with striving for something approaching the truth could not have been timelier. Aimed not just at fellow historians, Evans’ book also provides lay readers with powerful insights into why history matters.    Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 Captivity narratives are as old as empire. But they have rarely been analysed with the kind of intellectual sophistication and subtlety that Linda Colley displays. For more than two centuries, the British strove for pre-eminence with powerful, non-Christian and non-white rulers across the Mediterranean, North America, India and