Reviews

On the centenary of Britain’s first Labour government, three recent histories cast a sympathetic eye over Ramsay MacDonald’s nine months in Number 10.

Pacy and even-handed, Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass is unlikely to be bettered as a portrait of the Tokyo trials.

American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs by Wes Davis falls short of examining the consequences that followed the wanderlust.

Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang explores the discrimination beneath Hollywood’s glamour.

Mary Fulbrook’s Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust holds the ambivalent accountable.

In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelia Nuttall & the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations by Merilee Grindle depicts a woman ahead of her time, yet very much a product of it.

In Theoderic the Great: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans, Hans-Ulrich Wiemer fully reinforces his vision of Theoderic as a man grappling with challenges which still confront us today.

New books by Natasha Wheatley and Richard Cockett explain how for all its apparent anachronism the Hapsburg empire, and its capital, shaped the modern world.

Richard Whatmore’s The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis takes the ideals of the 18th century on their terms.

Jane Austen’s Wardrobe by Hilary Davidson seeks to provide the context that more than two centuries of changes in fashion have obscured.