New Books in Western European Studies

In popular accounts of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the autocratic Catholic King James II was ousted by his subjects and replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart, wife of James’s nephew, the Dutch William III of Orange. Devoted to her husband, Mary would not accept the crown alone, and so William and Mary were crowned together, securing a smooth dynastic succession. The Last Invasion of...

The story of Polish Jewry, pre-Holocaust Europe’s largest Jewish community, is often told as one of creativity and contestation. In his new book, An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland , University of Chicago professor Kenneth B. Moss traces instead a complex and painful story of Polish Jewish reckoning with diasporic vulnerability, nationalism’s terrible potencies, Zion...

Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner: The South Caucasus and Scandinavia, 1880s–1920s (Northern Illinois University Press, 2026) tells the story of the historical connections between two geographically distant and culturally distinct regions on the edges of Europe: Scandinavia and the South Caucasus. From the late nineteenth century, maritime trade fostered new commercial links and consular relations....

In the two decades between the First and Second World Wars, Jewish parents in Poland faced a proliferation of choices when it came to educating their children. Each choice offered a vision of what future Polish Jews desired, what they expected, and the gap between the two. State schools taught in Polish (sometimes with a schedule to accommodate traditional religious observance), secularist Yiddish...

Ancient Greek lives on in our culture in surprising ways. Sometimes funny - the word for an actor, hupokrites, gives us 'hypocrite'; sometimes beautiful - an astronaut is literally a sailor of the skies. And that's before we get to the myths which gave us our Achilles heel or our Midas Touch. And what about crocodile tears, which comes from the Greek's belief that crocodiles cried while eating th...

With commentary on the emergence of a ‘multipolar’ world, of transatlantic rifts and the rise of ‘middle powers’ ubiquitous, tales of the decline of something called ‘the West’ seem to be everywhere. Yet the meanings the idea of ‘the West’ acquires in spaces beyond it tell us at least as much about the state of the world as portents of its demise. Based on a combination of cultural analysis of hi...

 The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West  (Verso Books, 2026) is the definitive history of a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory. “Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult l...

Nineteenth-century Germany invented the way we eat. Women experimenting in households, French chefs fleeing guillotines, and one of the most rapidly evolving food industries in the world forged recognizably modern eating practices between 1780 and 1910. While central Europeans merely aimed to survive long winters, experiment with translated recipes and curious ingredients from abroad, and embrace...

What do we talk about when we talk about Europe? Is it defined by geography? Or is it politics, or shared culture? In Europe: A New History (Allen Lane, 2026), award-winning historian Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as never before—as the history of an idea, and a collective identity. Since its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, 'Europe' has been defined, and redefined, by its people. T...

The Spectre of Pep: How Guardiola Haunts Modern Football Tactics (Seven Dials, 2026) by Jon Mackenzie A spectre is haunting European football. Watch almost any game, no matter the level, and you will notice it. From inverted full backs to extreme high lines, the tactical threads of the match will eventually converge onto a singular point: Pep Guardiola. For some though, his near total dominance h...

Displays of Belonging: Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 (Cornell UP, 2025.) illuminates the lives and work of Polish Jewish collectors and museologists, who sought to preserve the treasures of the Jewish past while demonstrating Jewish belonging on Polish soil. As Jews comfortable in the Polish language and within Polish artistic and academic society, they saw themselves as intermed...

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press, 2026) talks with Yulia Gradskova and Ieva Bisigirskaitė, two of the three authors behind Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden . Together with Soheyla Yazdanpanah, they explore what nationalists mean by "good mothers," demographic anxiety, and maternal activism in Lithuania, Russia and Sweden. You can purcha...

After a great human-wrought tragedy, how are victims and their kin made right? What does it mean to take revenge, to exact vengeance, to seek redress, to go vigilante in seeking justice? What counts as the proper or sufficient retaliation or retribution--and what can or should be left to the impartial third-person mechanisms of a justice system? To ask about those troubling topics from a new angle...

Henry VIII is England’s most famous king. He is simultaneously the virtuous Renaissance prince gone wrong, the psychopathic, paranoid tyrant, the religious disruptor and the much-married glutton. Overlord: The Life and Reign of Henry VIII (Birlinn, 2026) is a groundbreaking study of Henry’s life examines and destroys many of the long-repeated myths about this complex monarch: he was not particular...

The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Katie Barclay tells the surprising history of our most intimate gesture: the kiss. Richly illustrated, it explores a millennium of kisses, asking how and why the kiss has retained its power over the centuries, and what it might mean today. From the furtive kisses of fated lovers Heloise and Abelard to The Godfather’s ‘kiss of d...

Andrew Buchanan and Ruth Lawlor, The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives (Cornell University Press, 2025) This ambitious edited collection encourages readers to think in bigger ways about the global Second World War. That includes a wider frame in space and time, but also a larger geopolitical perspective of the war as a world-system crisis and an expanded social perspective on who foug...

What if the legends of submerged cities, land-making witches and sea-crossing bishops are not mere inventions but echoes of real events? Whispers from Celtic Seas: The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe (Reaktion Books, 2026) by Professor Patrick Nunn at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia revisits coastal traditions from the Celtic fringes of northwest Europe, sh...

Born in 1102, Empress Matilda combined the blood of two dynasties: the house of Wessex and their conquerors, the dukes of Normandy. As a widowed German empress, she was named as heir successor by her father, Henry I. But, after his death in 1135, Matilda’s place on the English throne was usurped by her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Civil war followed, and she ruled the south-west of England in opposit...

In this episode of the CEU Review of Books Podcast, I sat down with Mikuláš Pešta to talk about his new book, Student Internationalism and the Global Cold War: The International Union of Students in Socialist Prague (Bloomsbury, 2026). During our discussion we touched upon how the International Union of Students ended up being headquartered in Prague, the organisation's various activities, and the...

The Israeli destruction of Gaza has returned the idea of genocide to the center of world politics, with sharp conflicts between the protesters and lawyers who invoke it and the governments and media that deny it. The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges After Gaza (Agenda Publishing, 2025), by the foremost sociological theorist of genocide, Martin Shaw, defends the idea ag...

Art and Citizenship in Conflict: British Women War Artists, 1939-45 (Manchester UP, 2026) by Dr. Lucy Curzon examines the work of women war artists in order to highlight the complexity of citizenship and gender in Britain during the Second World War. Evelyn Dunbar, Mary Kessell, Ethel Gabain, Stella Schmolle, and Laura Knight, among others, were commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee...

 The Forger of Paris (Doppelhouse Press, 2025) presents Adolfo Kaminsky’s biography in its only authorized edition, expanded with photographs from Kaminsky's 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and accompanied by essays from MAHJ director Paul Salmona and National Jewish Book Award winner Deborah Dash Moore. "This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hi...

In 1217, the crusader states were in a highly fragile condition. The Fourth Crusade had failed, and Jerusalem had not been recovered. The crusaders now set their sights on Egypt. If the breadbasket of the Mediterranean could be conquered, long-term Christian control of the Holy Land could be ensured. Led by the rulers of Hungary and Austria, and backed by the Knights Templar and Hospitaller, the F...

For more than 10,000 years, cats have prowled at the edges of human life. But, starting only a few decades ago, hundreds of millions of them became pets. In Cats: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Rod Phillips shares a sweeping cultural and social history of felines, tracing their shifting place across societies and centuries, from ancient Egypt's revered hunters to Europ...

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic regional relationships, and place in the world. In Th...