Reviews of Books

Vanished Kingdoms


The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

My forty years in the writer's trade were marked by the publication of "Vanished Kingdoms". In many ways, it is my best book – wide-ranging, innovative in both form and content, and very solidly edited; but the latter stages of its production caused me more headaches than the preceding four decades.

Reviews - Vanished Kingdoms

In the country of the past

Friday 28 October 2011 The Independent, Ian Thomas

In pages of fact-packed prose, he [Davies] succeeds in giving voice to nations that have almost "no advocates" today. For that alone, Vanished Kingdoms is a magnificent (if at times slightly wearisome) achievement.

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

Friday 28 October 2011 The Telegraph, Ben Wilson

‘All the nations that have ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand” - writes Norman Davies. 

Ghost stories: a trawl through an historic unbelly

Saturday 05 November 2011 The Economist

“Vanished Kingdoms” gives full rein to his historical imagination and enthusiasms, imparting a powerful sense of places lost in time. All across Europe ghosts will bless him for telling their long-forgotten stories.

A study of Europe that suggests we can take nothing for granted

Friday 18 November 2011 The Guardian, Timothy Snyder

Yet Davies succeeds, and it is quite a success, in preserving the past as a rough guide to an uncertain future, rather than besieging it as a predictor of the uncontrollable present. It is superficially a book of its time; it is deeply a book about how we should think about time.

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe

Wednesday 21 December 2011 History Today, Michael Bloch

In this enjoyable and idiosyncratic historical excursion, Norman Davies discusses 15 European states of the past, widely varying in character. Three of them – the Byzantine Empire, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Soviet Union – were great empires which looked as if they would last forever; but they all disappeared, the first gradually over the centuries the last almost overnight.

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