Borderlines: A History of Europe, told from the edges – Baston Lewis (2024)

An illuminating history of twenty-nine key borderlines that demarcate Europe, and what they can tell us about the past, present and future of Europe. 'A stunningly topical and timely book. Lewis Baston is a remarkable talent, very gifted as a writer and quite extraordinarily perceptive and original in his thinking' Anthony Seldon Europe's internal borders have rarely been 'natural'; they have more often been created by accident or force. Successive powers have redrawn the map of our continent, with varying degrees of success: the fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but the present shape of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945. In Borderlines, writer and political historian Lewis Baston journeys along and across key borders from west to east Europe, to explore their history. He explores how places and people heal from the scars, physical and psychological, left by a Europe of ethnic cleansing and barbed wire fences. And he searches for a better European future amid the ravages of Brexit, COVID and war - finding it in unexpected places, scattered from the back lanes of rural Ireland to the…