MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Steppeing out
JOHN GREEN welcomes a new history that makes the reader question both origins and national identities
NATION BUILDER: Statue of Timur (Tamerlane) by Ivan Jabbarov in his place of birth Shahrisabz, Uzbekistan. Behind the ruins of the Ak-Saray palace finished in 1404 a year before Timur’s death - built over 24 years it was destroyed in the 16th century Abdullah Khan II, the Khan of Bukhara. It is, since 2000 a UNESCO World Heritage site
[Ljuba brank/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Empires of the Steppes – the nomadic tribes who shaped civilisation
By Kenneth W Harl, Bloomsbury, £30
LIKE many other readers, I imagine, the history I learned at school was almost exclusively modern European, with its birthplace in Greek and Roman antiquity. In recent times historians have been moving away from such western eurocentrism.
Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads offered us a very different perspective on our civilisation with the centre of gravity shifted to China and the Far East. Harl’s fascinating history takes us further back in time to demonstrate that our modern world has been very much shaped by the nomadic peoples of the great steppe lands of the east in ways few of us are aware of. It was they who facilitated the emergence of the Silk Road as a vital trading and communications conduit between Asia and western Europe.
The nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppes dominated human development in the Near and Far East as well as much of Europe for around 45 centuries. From the first steppe nomads who domesticated the horse and learned how to exploit the vast grasslands of Eurasia, they helped create the peoples and languages of Europe and the Far East we are familiar with today.
More from this author
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
JOHN GREEN is stirred by an ambitious art project that explores solidarity and the shared memory of occupation
JOHN GREEN applauds an excellent and accessible demonstration that the capitalist economy is the biggest threat to our existence
JOHN GREEN isn’t helped by the utopian fantasy of a New York Times bestseller that ignores class struggle and blames the so-called ’progressives’
