France: An Adventure History remains, from cover to cover, a truly different history. It is long and densely packed with knowledge, just not told in a traditional narrative.

To seek a more cautious understanding of fascism through scholarly literature, there is probably no place to start more respected than Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, now more than a decade old.

Francisco Franco, perhaps the ultimate litmus test for twentieth-century political ideology, gets a new biography of merit. But in attempting a more judicious portrait of Spain’s most preeminent political figure, the authors often overlook considerable atrocities.