Volume 44, Number 8 · May 15, 1997
Doing the Continental
By R.J.W. Evans
Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Oxford University Press, 1365 pp., $39.95
Few books command a major field for sixty years. Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher's long History of Europe, first published in 1935, was one such. It was a book with authority, not least because the writer had been minister of education in Britain, the man who introduced state scholarships to allow pupils to study at university regardless of their means. Yet Fisher's History was badly timed. He wrote it, from a vantage point within the English establishment, as testimony to the fading Christian values of a continent in decay, to its 'squandered treasure of humanity, tolerance and good sense.' Within a very few years—by 1940, in fact, when, as the Second World War reached London, Fisher was killed there by a truck—he already needed a successor.
Review, 5502 words
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