Allen Lane, 490pp, £30
This book contains 12 essays about 20th-century European leaders, ‘who for good, and most strikingly ill, succeeded in bending the arc of history’, wrote Philip. ‘Organised around a series of individual portraits, the book is more than the sum of its parts. We learn that [Thomas] Carlyle was right. To chart the place of Hitler and Stalin or Churchill and De Gaulle is to appreciate the profound impact of individuals. But Marx, we see, also had a point. Churchill and De Gaulle were among the consequential leaders made by the moment.’
