Trump Takes on the World, BBC2
Why, oh why, doesn’t the BBC commission more contemporary documentaries like this? As an institution, the BBC has unparalleled access to all the leading political players in the world. Just mention the three letters
BBC and world leaders generally agree to be interviewed. This kind of programme is not inordinately expensive to make, yet how many are made each year? One? Two?
Donald Trump’s foreign policy is one that will be analysed for decades to come. In some ways this three part documentary series barely scratches the surface. Part one looks at the US relationship with NATO and Europe. Part two looks at Trump’s efforts to bring about a settlement in the Middle East and the fallout with Iran, and part three examines Trump’s extraordinary policy towards North Korea. Each episode is gripping and the viewer learns a huge amount, including from those who were in the room.
Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Author of Valkyrie: Women of the Viking World
(Bloomsbury, 2020).
Neil Price’s
The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings is a wide-ranging and engaging account of the Viking Age. Never shirking from the cruelties enacted by the Vikings, Price has a knack for picking up on prosaic details to tell a bold story of a society dramatically different from our own. The Vikings may have been the first Europeans in America but Alan Mikhail’s
God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World makes a persuasive case for the importance of the Ottoman empire for the colonial expansion to the Americas in the 16th century. Sultan Selim was moulded by a formidable mother whose ambitions propelled her son to immense power and her political savvy makes her quite as interesting as her son. On the subject of mothers,