Helmut kohl

Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator for the EU Commission, called Brexit an expression of ‘hope for a return to a powerful global Britain, nostalgia for the past’ – a mood that ‘serves no purpose in politics’. Popular historians have echoed his view of nostalgia as a syndrome which affects declining societies such as Great Britain. The yearning for a happier past got Donald Trump elected and may re-elect him; it breeds xenophobia and locks societies into a doom loop of reruns, remakes and Facebook feeds of photographs from olden times. Or does it? Two new histories of nostalgia are sceptical about how pervasive or dangerous it really is. Agnes Arnold-Forster’s

This is an important and topical book. Mary Sarotte traces the difficult course of Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States during the decade which followed the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, a period which saw Russia’s brief dalliance with democracy and Nato’s advance to the frontiers of the old Soviet Union. The story has been told before, but never so fully or so well. In a remarkable historical coup, Sarotte has persuaded the German foreign ministry to open its archives to her, and the Americans to declassify thousands of documents previously closed to researchers. When Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was moved to denounce so much