Western History Shorts

Europe is an astonishingly successful place. In this dazzling new history, best-selling author Simon Jenkins grippingly tells the story of its evolution from warring peoples to peace, wealth and freedom - a story that twists and turns from Greece and Rome, through the Dark Ages, the Reformation and the French Revolution, to the Second World War and up to the present day. Jenkins takes in leaders from Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc to Wellington and Angela Merkel as well as cultural figures from Aristotle to Shakespeare and Picasso.

A Short History of Western Thought outlines the 2,500-year history of European ideas from the philosophers of classical antiquity to the thinkers of today; no major representative of any significant strand of Western thought escapes Trombley's attention. Included are the Christian Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, the German idealists from Kant to Hegel, and the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein.