German history is uniquely awful: that’s what makes it so engrossing

As I grew up half German in England in the 1970s, my German heritage was confined to the few curios my grandmother had brought here after the war: a signet ring, a cigarette case, a scrapbook with some missing pages…. She’d changed her name, she’d changed my father’s name, the nation she came from lay in ruins — but from this salvaged bric-à-brac I pieced together the story of my father’s German family, a story they’d done their best to bury in the country they’d left behind. Through a range of objects, large and small, from the Gutenberg Bible to the Reichstag, the director of the British Museum has done much the same thing for Germany as a whole.

‘Accompanies the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series,’ reads the blurb, and indeed the contents of this book are pretty similar to Neil MacGregor’s radio series of the same name. If any series deserves a spin-off, however, it’s surely Germany: Memories of a Nation.