Churchill is often ranked as one of the most hated figures in Irish history but he was also one of the most influential politicians in shaping relations both within and between Britain and Ireland. Churchill played a formative role in the ‘Irish Question’. At the beginning of his career he was a Unionist, inheriting his father’s sympathy for Ulster, but converted to Home Rule. The chapter contrasts the impact of social reforms in helping Irish pensioners with the role of Irish suffragettes in defeating Churchill at Manchester in 1908. It looks at how he tried to navigate between the Unionists and nationalists in the Edwardian era, before showing how the war (including Irish losses at Gallipoli) led to rebellion. Thereafter, Churchill pursued a dual strategy of repression and negotiation and played a key role in the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the subsequent events surrounding partition. His belligerence has tended to overshadow the multi-faceted ways he dealt with and thought about the Irish.

In a succinct and highly readable text, Alan E. Steinweis presents a synthesis of classic and recent research on the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. Rooted in nationalism and racism, and commanded by a charismatic leader, the Nazi movement created a populist and authoritarian alternative to a democratic republic plagued by unemployment and political fragmentation. A one-party dictatorship was achieved quickly after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. In the years before World War II, the Nazi regime achieved popularity by restoring Germany to great-power status and by presiding over an economic recovery fueled by rearmament. Simultaneously the regime set in place an apparatus of coercion to marginalize Jews and other groups deemed objectionable by Nazi ideology, as well as to quell domestic opposition to the declared goals of the German “People’s Community.” Nazi ideology formed the basis for Germany’s goals and actions in World War II, which aimed at German hegemony and a racial transformation of Europe. Despite considerable internal dissent and some active resistance, the Nazi regime mobilized German society behind the war effort. In the end, Nazism was defeated from the outside by a superior military alliance.

Chapter 8 surveys German-dominated Europe between September 1939 and June 1941. A Nazi empire was the source of millions of foreign laborers for the German economy. Germany’s occupation of Poland was especially severe, involving the annexation of territory, forced ethnic resettlement, and the systematic liquidation of much of that country’s leadership class. Occupation policy in Poland also included the ghettoization of the country’s Jewish population, which was also subjected to forced labor. These actions mirrored measures taken against German Jews, many of whom were made to live in “Jew Houses,” and perform labor for German municipalities and business enterprises. During this same period, the German government organized the mass murder of Germans institutionalized for mental disabilities. The program, known as T4, was staffed by medical personnel who arranged for the transfer of patients from clinics and hospitals to killing centers, which employed poison gas. About 70,000 patients were murdered under the auspices of T4, which ceased operation in the face of mounting protest in German society. The killing of disabled patients continued in other forms through the end of the war, while many of the T4 personnel were transferred to Poland to organize the mass murder of Jews through poison gas.

Churchill’s art has remained marginal to the study of his legacy in the twentieth century and yet he was in correspondence with some of the most highly regarded painters of the period, and was successfully presented and reviewed. The chapter explores Churchill’s relationship with art: his encounter with painting, his mentors and influences, painting, politics and the tension between tradition and modernism in the art of his age, the reception of his works, and the question of the amateur versus the professional artist.

For much of the decade prior to 1940, Churchill was out of office and often seen as a warmonger. He saw appeasement as a policy not befitting a country of Britain’s standing that failed to take account of innate German militarism. One of his most effective tactics in opposing it was his evocative use of history, drawing parallels between his own life and that of his eighteenth-century ancestor, the 1st Duke of Marlborough. To Churchill, the British government’s dealings with Gandhi and the Congress Party were also a form of appeasement. There was a paradox in his thinking; that the forms of nationalism that bolstered British international power were legitimate, while those that did not were not. Churchill’s opposition to Hitler was based on his own first-hand experiences while researching his Marlborough biography and on his reading of the German ‘mental map’. The chapter traces his evolving response from the German occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 through to the Munich Crisis of 1938 and beyond. It ends by analysing Churchill’s path to power as prime minister, suggesting that far from being a triumph of opportunity, there were simply no other suitable candidates for the post.

The chapter explores the background to Churchill’s upbringing and its bearing on his future career. It introduces and contrasts his American Jerome lineage with his aristocratic British Marlborough ancestry before describing the courtship and early married life of Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill. Winston’s education is placed in the context of the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of his father’s political career, the family’s financial difficulties and Lord Randolph’s failing health. The chapter finishes with an analysis of Churchill’s family inheritance and concludes that its importance was more social and political than financial.

After a brief discussion of prehistory and pre-Roman and Roman past of the territory of modern Serbia, the chapter turns to the Slav and Avar migrations of the sixth and seventh centuries, which permanently altered the demographics of Central and South-Eastern Europe. It then explores the origins of the Serbs and traces the formation of the first Serb and South Slav polities in the ninth and tenth centuries. Key to understanding this period is the Serbs’s relationship with Byzantium and neighbouring peoples, including Bulgarians, Croats and Hungarians. The chapter also explores the Serbs’ conversion to Christianity and the beginning of literacy among the South Slavs.

Chapter 6 examines a spectrum of policies and practices employed by the Nazi regime to impose ideological conformity on Germans and to marginalize those regarded as racially alien, hereditarily damaged, or hostile to the People’s Community. At the core of the apparatus of coercion was the Secret State Police (Gestapo) and a network of concentration camps, both of which operated to a significant extent outside the traditional system of justice. While only a minority of Germans spent time in concentration camps, the mainstream of society was subjected to daily rituals of conformity, such as contributing to the Winter Relief campaigns, decorating one’s home with Nazi flags, and performing the Hitler salute. Organized resistance to the regime remained diffuse and ineffective in peacetime. Based on ideas from the international eugenics movement and on practices developed in the United States, the regime implemented a systematic program of eugenic sterilization. The regime translated its antisemitic ideology into action by legally defining the Jews as a race separate from the Germans, banning Jews from a variety of professions, and pursuing a process of “Aryanization” in which Jews were pressured to sell their property. Roma and Sinti (“Gypsies”) also became subject to racialization and persecution.

The chapter begins with the emergence of the Serb kingdom of Raška in the early thirteenth century under the Nemanjić dynasty in the backdrop of a temporary collapse of Byzantium. At this time, Serbia was a de facto dual Orthodox-Catholic state, although the early thirteenth century saw the establishment of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox church. Serbia’s territorial expansion over the next 150 years was facilitated by the crises in Byzantium and Bulgaria and by a bourgeoning economy due to exploitation of mines and trade with Dubrovnik and Venice. In the mid-fourteenth century, Serbia under Stefan Dušan sought to usurp Byzantium, but following Dušans death his short-lived Serb-Greek empire fragmented, as regional magnates fought for the supremacy in the region. This was before the Serbs suffered a fateful defeat against the Ottomans at the Field of Kosovo in 1389. A post-Kosovo Serb despotate, a key successor state to Stefan Dušans empire, prospered politically, economically and culturally for several decades. It was finally conquered in 1459, as the whole region came under the Ottoman control in the second half of the fifteenth century.

Who was Winston Churchill? In 2017 he was portrayed both as an irascible, tub-thumping, cigar-chewing maverick by Gary Oldman in the film Darkest Hour and as a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown wracked by guilt over his role in the First World War by Brian Cox in the movie Churchill. Both films are perhaps revealing of what contemporary audiences want to see; a loner who defies the establishment and a leader who develops through a redemptive arc, suffering a crisis of conscience only to have his resolve stiffened through contact with ordinary people before re-finding his voice. It makes for great drama, but it is not history.