The Penguin History of Europe reaches its seventh volume (out of nine) with Richard J. Evans’s thorough and wide-ranging work on the 99 years from 1815 to 1914. It comes between two formidable books by formidable scholars: his fellow Cambridge historian Tim Blanning took the story from the close of the Thirty Years’ War to Waterloo, and the Hitler authority Ian Kershaw covered 1914 to 1949.
Each of those volumes is much as one would expect of the author: Blanning’s shows his background as a polymath, and his expertise in the histories of more than one major European power; Kershaw’s puts the rise of the Third Reich and its consequences at the centre of his. But Evans developed under the influence of E.H. Carr and the Marxist historians, and his book comes back time and again to issues of class. To label it as straightforward Marxist history would not be fair, though the skidmarks are visible.
Evans dedicates his book to the memory of Eric Hobsbawm, to whom many in the Cambridge History Faculty (where the author was regius professor) accord a reverence and respect that less acute and privileged souls may find hard to understand.
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