‘This book’ is Mark Mazower’s latest, Governing the World: The History of an Idea. There’s an extract in the current issue of The Nation that gives a good flavour of its themes in discussing the international (dis)order and what replacement for it might stagger out of the mists of the current crisis.

It will be interesting to compare it to Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles, which also looked at the clash between nation state-based organisation and globalized financial markets, but in far happier times. And to Tony Judt’s amazing Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.

I loved Mazower’s book Salonica, City of Ghosts, and his Dark Continent: Europe’s 20th Century. He also wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times recently, and the new book was reviewed positively by Paul Kennedy in the FT, and negatively in Standpoint.