Philip Ziegler’s books of the year

In her biography of William Morris Fiona MacCarthy opened a window onto the brilliantly talented yet curiously anaemic world of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. In The Last Pre-Raphaelite she switches her attention to Morris’s once great friend and later stern critic, Edward Burne-Jones. Her scholarship is exemplary; her style fluent; her judgment discriminating; above all, she makes her weird galère come vividly alive. Her book is fun to read.

No one could say the same of Ian Kershaw’s The End.  Kershaw is not into fun: his cool yet remorselessly horrific account of the last days of Hitler’s Reich should be compulsory reading for any ruler contemplating taking his country into war. Kershaw is the unchallenged master of German history in the second world war and the years leading up to it; The End is the crown of his great enterprise which must leave him wondering which way he should now go.