The Oxford History of Modern Europe belongs to a more leisured era. Its first volume, A.J.P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, appeared in 1954. Half a century later its two founding fathers, William Deakin and Alan Bullock, are dead, and their project remains incomplete. Individual volumes cover Germany, France from 1848 to 1945, Spain, the Low Countries, Romania and the European Jews. As yet they include only tsarist (not Soviet) Russia, and there is nothing on Austria or Italy. Even so, the formula has generated a number of classics, which have remained in print for decades.

LRB 6 October 2005 | PDF Download