Instead, he teamed up with Timothy Snyder, a young historian of Eastern Europe, for a series of loosely structured chats on the contours of 20th-century history. The book that resulted is an often bracing tour d'horizon of the ideas and political ideologies that tormented and defined the last century. Judt and Snyder go back and forth about a myriad of topics: the role of intellectuals; the fate of Mitteleurope's Jewish culture; the allure of communism and fascism; the fortunes of liberalism against totalitarianism; the historian's craft; Israel and US foreign policy - Judt is scathing about both; and the prospects for social democracy in the 21st century. Snyder guides the dialogues, but there is still organic disorder to the proceedings: we hear the ebb and flow of real conversation.

The subject of intellectuals - their virtues and, more often, their vices - takes up a good bulk of these pages. Judt excoriates US liberal thinkers who supported - and the policymakers who carried out - the Iraq war. For Judt, it was a replay of the habits of mind that tarnished so much of 20th-century intellectual life: "Once again, other people's ordeals are being justified as History's way of delivering a new world." It was merely a continuation of a dismal tradition. "The intellectual sin of the [20th] century," Judt tells Snyder, was "passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information." In earlier works like Past Imperfect and The Burden of Responsibility, Judt wrote harshly about the blindness of Sartre and other Left Bank intellectuals about Stalin's crimes.

Judt is a moralist, and a certain arrogance colours his words. But he is often at pains to situate his views in the tumultuous context of 20th century. A man of the left, Judt liked to argue against the left. The son of Eastern European émigré Jews, Judt grew up in East London. His father was a diehard socialist who had only contempt for communists; in some ways, so too does the son.

But Judt acknowledges the importance of communism, whatever its flaws, as an ideological project. In an exchange about Eric Hobsbawm, the renowned historian and decades-long member of the defunct British Communist Party, Judt observes, "You cannot fully appreciate the shape of the 20th century if you did not once share its illusions, and the communist illusion in particular." However much Marx is tainted by the political movements that took inspiration from his theories, Marxism, as a philosophical system, has a very powerful logic to it. After all, it "is a marvellously compelling account of how history works, and why it works." Judt endorses Marxism's version of history as a chastisement "to liberals and progressives who assert that all is for the best". Against this, Marx "offers a powerful narrative of suffering and loss, deterioration and destruction".

Here, Snyder poses an interesting counter argument: if there are intellectual advantages to having been a Stalinist, then reason suggests there might be methodological gains to be had from being an ex-Nazi. Judt will have none of it. There are no Nazi Eric Hobsbawms, he says: "I simply cannot think of a single Nazi intellectual whose reasoning holds up as an interesting historical account of 20th-century thought." The historian was nothing if not bold in his sweeping dismissals of ideas he disagreed with.

This is also a volume of personal reflection. Judt wrote poignantly about his own past in his memoir The Memory Chalet, but here Snyder presses him further on the stations of his own political evolution. He scrutinises Judt's status as Englishman and Jew and transplanted New Yorker (Judt was for many years professor of history at New York University). Recalling his schooling, Judt notes that the "range of traditional cultural reference, this sense of being at home in English if not exactly in England ... allowed me to swing comfortably back from youthful politics towards the liberal mainstream in later life".

Judt's own youthful radicalism was hardly outrageous. For him, the beach wasn't under the pavement: the idea that students were at the vanguard of history in 1968 was something "I could never quite get enthused about". Whatever his Marxisant orientation, Judt was conditioned by his Englishness. Indeed, a theme that comes up in these conversations is the infinite, if slightly ridiculous, political accommodations of English society. Unlike the European continent, political extremism never took root in Britain. Fascism fared poorly; communism only marginally better. For an ideological affiliation in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union, you might get lined up against a wall and shot. In the United States, communism might have been an impediment to a career; in England, Hobsbawm became a man of the establishment. This curious state of affairs is nicely summed up in a comic anecdote Judt relates about a demonstration against the Vietnam War in London. Running in the street after a rowdy confrontation with the defence secretary, Judt encounters a policeman who inquires, "So how was the demonstration, sir?" Judt, "finding nothing bizarre or absurd in his inquiry", responded, "I think it went quite well, don't you." It was "no way to make a revolution".

Snyder and Judt cover an enormous amount of ground as they ponder some of the most difficult questions of political history. But Judt does not ignore the present. If he made his name with his writings on the French left and the European past, Judt, in the last phase of his life, turned to the issues of our time. He was not shy. In 2003, he published an infamous essay in The New York Review of Books calling for a one-state solution and equal rights for all Jews and Arabs. The piece prompted a torrent of correspondence (and several cancellations), as well as Judt's banishment from the The New Republic, for whom he wrote many brilliant pieces.

Judt here reviews his own tangled history with Israel. Fired by the socialist Zionism of Israel's early leaders, he worked on several kibbutzim as a young man. But he was quickly disabused of his ideals after a stint in the Israel Defense Forces when he was 19. What he found outside the kibbutz was "not a social-democratic paradise of peace-loving, farm-dwelling Jews who happened to be Israelis but otherwise like me." Here was another of the 20th century's illusions to be shed. In the army "he met Israelis who were chauvinistic in every sense of the word: anti-Arab in a sense bordering on racism; quite undisturbed at the prospects of killing Arabs wherever possible". His views on Israel earned Judt much censure, and his comments will surely make a few readers squirm. He is unstinting in his criticisms of American Jews' support for Israel.

It would seem that Judt wishes most of the political ideologies he debates with Snyder to be consigned to the dustbin of history. But there is one creed, molded from the wreckage of the 20th-century war, revolution, and conflict, that he passionately defends: social democracy. This was not an achievement of the revolutionary left. Rather, it was pragmatic liberal reformers who after the Second World War "forged strong, high taxing and actively interventionist states which could encompass complex mass societies without resorting to violence or repression".

The lines are drawn: "The choice we face in the next generation," Judt muses about the coming decades, "is not capitalism versus communism, or the end of history versus the return of history, but the politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes versus the erosion of society by the politics of fear". It's a standoff whose outcome, at this juncture, remains uncertain.

Rejecting sterile academic convention, which, they charged, stressed mannered artifice at the expense of ‘‘truth,’’ they took their example from the 14th and early 15th century Italian painters who came before Raphael. (Like many avant-gardes, the way forward was to look backward.) Fidelity to nature was one of their creeds: In his famed {I cut date} painting of Ophelia’s drowning, John Everett Millais was said to have scoured the English countryside for just the right brook — only to complain when swans ate the floating plants as he painted them.

Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), the subject of Fiona MacCarthy’s acute biography, ‘‘The Last Pre-Raphaelite,’’ was part of the Brotherhood’s later phase. Like Millais, he too was committed to ultra-realistic treatment of the details. For his sequence about Sleeping Beauty, ‘‘Briar Rose,’’ Burne-Jones wrote a friend wondering ‘‘if in the woods near you there are tangles of briar rose — and if deep in some tangle there is a hoary, aged, ancestor of the tangle — thick as a mist and with long horrible spikes on it.’’ Yet like his confreres, Burne-Jones mixed fanatical particulars with stagy, almost dreamlike scenes.

A bridge between the Pre-Raphaelites and the fantastical realms of Aestheticism and Symbolism, Burne-Jones stood against the age. His admirer Oscar Wilde recalled him ‘‘saying to me ‘the more materialist science becomes, the more angels shall I paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul.’’’ A bearded, charming, mercurial man prone to neurotic fits, Burne-Jones believed in chivalric codes, and the ideal of the artist-craftsman. Canvas was not his only medium: He was equally adept mosaics, tapestries, tile, and stained glass windows, which can be found on churches across England.

Looking back to medieval ideals of craftsmanship, Burne-Jones mounted a ferocious critique of his times through a cult of beauty. ‘‘He believed boldly in the power of art to counteract the spiritual degradation, the meanness and corruption he saw everywhere around him in the ruthlessly expansionist, imperialistic Britain of the nineteenth century,’’ MacCarthy observes. Burne-Jones was ‘‘the licensed escapist of his period, penetrating an art of ancient myths, magical landscapes, insistent sexual yearnings, that expressed deep psychological needs for his contemporaries.’’

Like many biographies today, ‘‘The Last Pre-Raphaelite’’ is a tad overlong and nearly bursting at the seams. But MacCarthy, a noted biographer and art critic, writes with such command of her material that the length of her book can be easily forgiven. John Ruskin, Burne-Jones’s mentor and the greatest art critic of the age, once told him ‘‘I want to reckon you up and it’s like counting clouds.’’ MacCarthy herself concedes Burne-Jones ‘‘prevaricates and teases, tries to slip away.’’ But he does not elude her grasp. From his boyhood in the industrial city of Birmingham, to his education at Oxford, his journeys to Italy with Ruskin, who would push him to study the Italian masters, then his in career London and beyond, as well as his troubled emotional life — Burne-Jones was forever falling in love with young ingénues and artists’ models — MacCarthy gives us a full, fair, and splendidly rich portrait of Burne-Jones the artist and man.

At Oxford, Burne-Jones had intended to join the clergy; in the end, he traded Christianity for the religion of art. At university, Burne-Jones made one of the decisive friendships of his life: William Morris, who became a collaborator and close friend. (Morris got the MacCarthy treatment in her door-stopping 1994 bio.)The push-pull between Morris — poet, textile designer, typographer, interior decorator, radical utopian — and Burne-Jones is a defining feature of the book. But where Morris saw revolutionary potential in an armoire, Burne-Jones frowned on his friend’s hard-charging political campaigning. Burne-Jones thought the artist’s place should be in the studio, where he could continue his ‘‘quest for ideal beauty in a corrupt and apathetic world.’’ His west London house The Grange, became one of the HQs of Pre-Raphaelite circles.

MacCarthy is excellent on Burne-Jones’s phenomenal output, which almost defies belief. His paintings offer up alternative worlds of enchanted grace, perhaps none more so than ‘‘The Golden Stairs’’ (1880), with its evocation of young female beauty in motion. The painting became a touchstone of the Aesthetic movement of the 1890s. But the artistic children he spawned often appalled Burne-Jones, however much he pushed Pre-Raphaeletism towards the 20th century. Aubrey Beardsley’s sexual grotesques mortified him. Burne-Jones once mused, ‘‘Lust does frighten me ..... I don’t know why I’ve such a dread of lust.’’ He knew first hand of sexual yearning — he nearly wrecked his marriage when he pursued the fiery Maria Zambaco, a notorious Pre-Raphaelite ‘‘stunner.’’ In his art, Burne-Jones could modulate what he could not in life.

The British historian Norman Davies has spent much of his career battling such blinkered provincialism. Part of this is a legacy of the Cold War, when Europe was divided along eastern and western lines. Communist Eastern Europe fell apart after 1989, but an Iron Curtain of the mind still persists, artificially dividing Europe into two halves. There are exceptions - no one would consider Prague anything but a jewel among European cities - but we could not say the same thing about, say, Bucharest.

Davies has been a scourge of such thinking. His early work was devoted to the history of Poland, where he is something of a national hero: for Davies, Kraków has every right to be mentioned in the same breath as Paris. He stands up for the forgotten, the neglected and the marginal. Small nations such as Estonia get a sympathetic hearing from Davies, even if his advocacy, at times, leads to a certain crudeness of touch. He is a historiographical pugilist; he throws a lot of sharp elbows. His visceral anti-communism suggests that it was the Soviet Union, almost more than the Third Reich, that posed the greatest threat to the 20th century.

In his gargantuan and controversial previous work Europe: A History, Davies ripped up the map of the continent, and made over Europe into an altogether more exotic, troubled and diverse civilisation, one that ignores such truths at its peril. In many ways, his mammoth new work (he seems to write no other kind) is a continuation of his earlier tome. Vanished Kingdoms: A History of Half-Forgotten Europe, proposes an alternative vision of the past 2,000 years of European history. It is a Baedeker of kingdoms, duchies, republics and empires that once dotted the European map. With the EU in a permanent state of crisis, a book about deceased polities seems almost cruelly well timed.

Davies’ theme could be taken from a few lines of Shelley’s Ozymandias: Look upon his work and despair. Nothing beside remains. This is not a very cheerful book. Starting with Visigoths, and stopping at Burgundy, Byzantium, Prussia, the province of Galicia, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and ending with the Soviet Union, Davies, with a comparative and bold sweep, ploughs through a complex maze of cultural, political and military themes. In typically brusque, lapel-grabbing fashion, he accuses his readers of amnesia and historians of “an addiction with great powers”. Davies’ concern here is the past’s losers. His message: every nation will wind up in history’s dustbin.

“The panorama of the past is indeed studded with greatness, but it is filled in the main with lesser powers, lesser people, lesser lives and lesser emotions,” he observes gloomily. “Most importantly, students of history need to be constantly reminded of the transience of power, for transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order. Sooner or later, all things come to an end. Sooner or later, the centre cannot hold. All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.”

The history lesson Davies delivers is a sharp rebuke to anyone complacent about the current map of Europe. Powerful states such as France and Germany may seem immutable; but they are no more or less secure than the realms Davies surveys across 700 pages. In a book of such ambition and reach, there is frequently tedium to navigate. Not all of Davies’ chapters hold together. But at his best, he deepens our understanding of the evolution of Europe.

Take the instance of Burgundy, perhaps the most complex of the polities Davies surveys. Once a vast entity, Burgundy in its early version was roughly divided into French and German-speaking sections. But, as Davies explains, even this distinction is inaccurate. If one tries to pinpoint Burgundy to a specific - usually French - location, that is to miss “the key feature, namely that Burgundy was a moveable feast”. Burgundy was an ever-shifting, mutating kingdom.

At its apogee, in the mid-15th century, Burgundy stretched from the south of France all the way to the Flemish plains, and included Dijon, Luxembourg, Bruges, Ghent, Grenoble, Geneva, Brussels and Amsterdam. Through a combination of strategic marriages, bequests, dowries and conquest, Burgundy flourished. So complex was its organisation that one of the illustrious duke-counts, Charles le Temeraire (“The Rash”), who ruled from 1467-77, held nothing less than 15 titles: count of Artois, duke of Limburg, duke of Brabant, duke of Lothier, duke of Burgundy, duke of Luxembourg, count-palatine of Burgundy, margrave of Namur, count of Charolais, count of Zeeland, count of Flanders, count of Zutphen, duke of Guelders, count of Hainault and count of Holland.

Davies delights in such dynastic minutiae, but the going can get monotonous. He stays close to high politics and royal squabbles, the old-fashioned stuff of an A-level syllabus. But he often deploys clever tricks of historical perspective to upset conventional notions about European history.

The mighty Prussia, motor of the modern German state, is often associated with authoritarianism and martial values that led to two world wars in the 20th century. But there is more to the story. “Prussia” was actually divided into two halves, Ducal Prussia and Royal Prussia. The latter fell into Polish orbit, and was eventually incorporated into the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in 1569 and was “the source of a separate political ideology and culture, based on concepts of freedom and liberty”. Davies writes: “Though the population was ethnically mixed, Polish and German ... the corporate identity and fierce local patriotism of Royal Prussia digressed markedly from the values with which the name of ‘Prussia’ is usually associated.”

Later German histories, Davies notes, omitted such facts: to German nationalists, Prussia could never be subservient to Poland.

National myths come in for a drubbing from Davies. And he doesn’t let Great Britain off the hook, either. In a mordant chapter on the duchy of Saxe-CoburgGotha, Davies mercilessly dissects the German provenance of the House of Windsor. Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, it will be remembered, was Prince Albert, born Franz Albrecht, who hailed from the house of Saxe-Coburg. There is much German blood in royal bloodlines from various Hanovers, Tecks and Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburgs, but these roots have been downplayed. Britain’s royal family may be held up as national monuments but, as Davies jibes, “they decided to pretend that it was something it wasn’t, and isn’t”.

He isn’t much more charitable about the future of the United Kingdom, whose days are numbered. That Scotland will break away is, he thinks, a matter of “when”, not “if”. Thus the United Kingdom will become yet another Vanished Kingdom; but such, Davies suggests, is the way of history.

With his shock of unruly white hair, thick glasses, and tweedy attire, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper looked every inch the English don. But he was far from a cloistered academic.

A globe-trotting journalist, influential scholar, and sparkling essayist, he was a central figure in many of the debates that roiled the trans-Atlantic intellectual world during the Cold War. Indeed, Trevor-Roper achieved a fame rare for a professor. Changing planes in Singapore in the early 1970s, Trevor-Roper’s secretary found out just how far his renown had spread. Asked by an official what she did, she replied that she worked for an Oxford historian.

“That must be dull,’’ the official said.

“Not at all,’’ she countered.

“Oh,’’ he sarcastically gibed, “I suppose you’re going to say that you work for Hugh Trevor-Roper.’’ When she answered yes, his eyes lit up: “The greatest mind in Europe!’’ he exclaimed.

A decade later, fame turned to shame when The Times of London enlisted him to sign off on diaries alleged to be Adolf Hitler’s. He did; they were not. It was one of the greatest fiascos in the history of journalism. The episode besmirched an otherwise glorious career, one that Adam Sisman does great justice to in this wonderful biography. “An Honourable Englishman’’ is a rich entertainment. A feast of highbrow tittle-tattle, ferocious battles over history, and delicious ironies, Sisman’s book is a model of its kind. Moving effortlessly from the common rooms of Oxbridge to tony country houses to lecture halls, Sisman gives us a frank and measured account of a proud, acerbic, and brilliant man.

The son of a country doctor and a descendant of minor gentry, Trevor-Roper grew up in a house ludicrously devoid of emotion. If this goes some way toward explaining his emotional reticence, he was intellectually the opposite. In 1932, he won a place at Christ Church, Oxford, then (and now), one of the university’s grandest colleges. Never a dreary academic, the young Trevor-Roper took to worldly pursuits - fishing, horseback riding, and hunting were favorites - and fortified himself with gallons of claret and beer. His epicurean habits - he would later earn the nickname “Pleasure-Loper’’ - little dented his academic performance, even if some deplored his aristocratic pretensions. He would really never escape the charge, but kept his critics at bay with a merciless wit.

The war disrupted Trevor-Roper’s academic career, but transported him right into the heart of the British establishment. As a Secret Intelligence Service officer, Trevor-Roper made his mark with his analyses of German intelligence. His duties led to a history-making assignment - to investigate the circumstances of Hitler’s final week in his Berlin bunker - which then led to “The Last Days of Hitler’’ in 1947, an instant classic that made Trevor-Roper’s name.

Not long after, Trevor-Roper told a correspondent, “I am really rather anxious to detach myself from my accidental connection with Nazi history, and to revert to my proper work!’’ This was England and Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries. He did pioneering research on the origins of the English Civil War and the “General Crisis’’ of the 17th century. Sisman’s account of Trevor-Roper’s historical views is superb. Was the Civil War, as Marxists contended, a bourgeois revolution, and thus a decisive event in the sequence of capitalist development? A skeptical liberal, Trevor-Roper rejected grim historical determinism. Revolutions are not required outcomes, even if they often seem otherwise - “It is not necessary to burn down the house to have a roast pig,’’ he mused. Yet he was all for scholarly innovation, as long as it was backed up by solid research. He looked to other disciplines - anthropology, sociology, economics - to complement the historian’s task. His work showed such insights, but he also stressed the role of folly and accident in history.

One knock on Trevor-Roper was that he never wrote a big book. “In some ways he resembled the scholars of the Renaissance and the early modern period,’’ Sisman observes, “who loved learning for its own sake, not for the use that might be made of it . . . Writing, too, was its own reward. Publication was inessential to him.’’ Not exactly. Trevor-Roper fussed over his prose—his beautifully calibrated essays unfurl with sly humor and forensic cunning—but he also reviewed hundreds of books for The Sunday Times, his longtime journalistic home, for whom he covered the Eichmann trial and investigated Kennedy’s death.

Sisman covers all of Trevor-Roper’s pursuits, including his marriage to the daughter of Earl Haig, British commander in chief during World War I, and his friendships with Isaiah Berlin and other high-profile intellectuals, with zest. If the rush of names, places, and people sometimes swamp his narrative, there are splendid anecdotes on nearly every page. For connoisseurs of mid-20th century Oxford life there is much delight here. A gem: Trevor-Roper once sold a horse to a wealthy student; the deal was transacted during a tutorial. If academic backbiting is your thing, “An Honourable Englishman’’ is a must. Trevor-Roper’s reputation for intellectual vituperation was well earned. During a legendary showdown with historian Lawrence Stone, a pupil found Trevor-Roper with a folder in his lap labeled “Death of Stone.’’ “Why are you so nasty to people?’’ another rival wondered.

But Trevor-Roper showed many kindnesses, even to his ideological opponents. He helped Eric Hobsbawm, a Communist Party member, get a US visa in the McCarthy era; and he commended the work of Marxist historian Christopher Hill to Oxford University Press. Sisman has not written a hagiography; he is generous, even compassionate, but unstinting as he tallies Trevor-Roper’s flaws. Sisman concludes “[i]t seems certain that his work will continue to be read long after his blunder has diminished into a mere footnote.’’ One hopes he is right.

Knopf. 655 pp

It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages," the 19th century alpinist Albert Mummery observed. "An inaccessible peak - the most difficult ascent in the Alps - an easy day for a lady." Put another way, all mountains are destined to be negotiated, and made traversable - even enjoyable - for most anyone.

Mummery was one of a clutch of British climbers who pioneered the sport of mountaineering in the Victorian era. He conquered the Alps, which, in Leslie Stephen's memorable formulation, became "the playground of Europe," at least for the leisured classes. But a certain kind of climber could never settle on just bagging a Matterhorn or Mont Blanc.

The real test lay east; that is, in the Himalayas, the vast range that crowns the Indian subcontinent's northern edge and home to the world's tallest mountains. The Himalayas, however, would never be an easy day for a lady - or anyone else, as Mummery himself found out in 1895 when he tried to scale the 7,950m Nanga Parbat. Swept away by an avalanche, Mummery was one of the first casualties of Himalayan mountaineering.

There would be many more. To a subsequent generation of Englishmen, the lure of the Himalayas would prove both irresistible and deadly, and no peak more so than Mount Everest. Climbers from other nations scrambled up and down other Himalayan heights, but Everest, until the 1950s, remained the special province of imperial Britain, whose surveyors had been first to pinpoint it as the highest mountain in the world. Looming over all, both in body count and in height, even today Everest remains an extremely hazardous pursuit. (For around US$65,000, you can attempt the climb - but there are no guarantees you will live.) Some 300 bodies remain scattered across its flanks, including the most renowned fatality in mountaineering history, George Mallory.

Mallory, the star player in the saga of the British Everest expeditions of the 1920s, is a figure of near myth. The finest climber of his day, Mallory and his partner Sandy Irvine disappeared not far from the summit in 1924. That they were agonisingly close to the top is not in doubt; but whether they made it all the way, 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic summit, has had mountaineers arguing yay or nay ever since.

The discovery of Mallory's body in 1999 on Everest's North Face infused the debate with new vigour and quickly occasioned several books and articles. Wade Davis's enthralling new account comes over a decade after these new fin-dings, but under no circumstances is he late to the party. To the contrary - seat him at the head of the table, for he has written far and away the best account of this seminal chapter in the epic history of mountaineering.

A magnificent feat of scholarship - Davis's annotated bibliography is a stunning work in its own right - and narrative drive, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest is a nearly perfect book, one of the two or three best titles to have ever come across this writer's desk. The story Davis tells is as thrilling as any yarn from the days of romantic travel. An anthropologist, prolific author and National Geographic Society's explorer-in-residence (who knew such a post still existed?), Davis ventures well beyond the old did-Mallory-or-didn't-he? debate, into ever richer considerations of what Everest meant to the legacy of imperial Britain and to the men who dared to scale it.

For Davis, the path to Everest runs through the battlefields of the First World War. As he argues, Everest offered war-scarred Britain, financially spent and spiritually broken, a totem, "a sentinel in the sky, place and destination of hope and redemption, a symbol of continuity in a world gone mad".

The war gives Into the Silence its unifying structure, and allows Davis to stitch together a formidable mass of detail. Francis Younghusband, mystical imperialist, veteran Himalayan hand and chairman of the Mount Everest Committee, called the mountain "the spotless pinnacle of the world". Indeed, its frigid, wind-swept heights radiated with a kind of holy, if terrifying, purity. Like the summit itself, Davis's larger points - about the redemptive powers of Everest for a traumatised nation - flicker in and out of view, sometimes obscured, sometimes brilliantly clear. But Davis has no real theoretical hobby horse to push; his strength is in showing, through loving and measured portraits of the 23 men who dared Everest, how the war altered their perceptions of the line between life and death.

These mostly upper-class English gents had seen the very worst - Arras, the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele; endured severe wounds and shell shock; lost brothers and other close relations. The war never disappears; we see it again and again through each of the characters as they are introduced one by one. The doomed Mallory, with his matinée idol looks and Bloomsbury connections, often gets the lion's share of attention. But Davis gives wonderfully expansive treatment to the other members of his crew, among them the Kiplingesque Charles Bruce, leader of the second and third expeditions. Bruce nearly lost both legs at Gallipoli; "His body was a canvas of bullet wounds," Davis writes. Bruce had a taste for fine champagne, and "for exercise carried his adjutant on his back up and down whatever mountain was at hand".

Howard Somervell, Mallory's closest friend on Everest and a surgeon during the war, walked through six acres of wounded soldiers on the first day of the Somme. But lest you get carried away by the grandeur of the Himalayan landscapes he so beautifully evokes, Davis, with an eye toward maximum gore, spares nothing in his descriptions of battle: "headless torsos, faces on fire, blood shooting out of helmets in three-foot streams, bodies cleft like the quartered carcasses in a butcher's shop, splinters of steel in brains, shattered backbones and spinal cords worming and flapping about in the mud."

For these men, "the war had changed the very gestalt of death". Inured to death, they tempted death every step of the way to Everest. But their experiences gave them bottomless reservoirs of fortitude - and they would need it. A kind of moral equivalent of war played out on the slopes. Even getting to Everest was an ordeal, a five-week trek across high mountain passes and the frigid climes of the high Tibetan plateau. The expeditions were run on military lines, a procession of yaks, mules, ponies and porters loaded with equipment and supplies.

They were lavishly provisioned - Bruce saw to that - and the men indulged in gingered lemons and tinned quail in aspic. The climbers didn't quite go up Everest in tweed, but they wore a hodgepodge of woollen underwear, flannel, cashmere puttees, Shetland pullovers and mufflers. Against savage winds, blinding sun and frigid cold, their kit was put to the test. ("The whole climate is trying and the extremes are so great that your feet can be suffering from frostbite while you are getting sunstroke at the same time," wrote the redoubtable Charles Howard-Bury, who led the first mission.) Even if some considered the use of oxygen unsporting, Mallory ultimately chose to use the gas on his fatal ascent. For all their eccentric touches, the expeditions were quite modern affairs, subsidised by "a combination of endorsements, discounts, and exclusive marketing arrangements for media, film, lecture and book rights that would later become the norm in the mountaineering world".

Needless to say, Tibet's lamas - Davis is superb on the Tibetan context and diplomatic manoeuvring needed to clear the way for the Everest missions - were bemused at the presence of the English and their strange desire to climb "Chomolungma". "I felt great compassion for them to suffer so much for such meaningless work," said one lama. One pushes to the end of Davis's story with a growing sense of dread; we know what is coming, yet Davis's account of Mallory's last hours is shattering in its pathos. For Mallory, climbing Everest - "a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world" as he described it - was less a vocation than a compulsion, one that he accepted with serene resignation.

Whether Mallory reached the summit - Davis leans towards the "no" camp - is beside the point. There was triumph in the way he faced down mortality.

A fitting epitaph comes from one of the men on the last expedition. They were all fine writers, but his words are particularly eloquent. After Mallory and Irvine had been lost, the expedition was on the return leg home, still camped very high on the Tibetan plateau. That night, he looked out from his tent, and took in the moment. Everest soared in the distance, "the scene of protracted adventure, spread out like a map and bathed in soft full moonlight". He thought of the climbers, and their fate. "That night and with that scene in front of one, it was quite easy to realise that the price of life is death, and that, so long as the payment be made promptly, it matters little to the individual when the payment is made."

There are no foregone conclusions in war. In June 1944, Hitler's defeat seemed imminent. The Allies had Nazi Germany in a vice, squeezing the Third Reich's forces on two fronts. British and American troops pushed towards the Rhine from France, while the Red Army battered German armies on the vastness of the Eastern Front. But there would be no tidy victory for the Allies - it would be their hopes that would collapse in the summer heat, not the Nazi regime.

The war in Europe would last for nearly another year, as the Nazis held off the three greatest powers on Earth. Germany's defiance was a kind of perverse miracle, even as its tenacity brought ruin and misery on its people, and even more horrors for Jews, slave labourers, POWs and others who fell foul of the regime. Hitler threw everything he had at the forces converging on his borders. Consider that of 5.5 million German troops who were killed in the war, nearly 2.5 million died in its last 10 months alone. Soldiers were hardly alone in their suffering. For civilians, especially in the east, where the invading Soviets used rape and murder to terrorise the population, life was a daily round of fear, privation and weariness.

Vowing to defend Germany from destruction at the hands of its enemies, Hitler ensured its destruction. In his impressive new book, Ian Kershaw grapples with this paradox to explain carefully how Germany fought on and, more importantly, why Germany chose this path. The story he tells is complex, troubling and sometimes incomplete, but he is well equipped for the task. A pioneering historian of Nazi Germany, Kershaw is the author of, among other books, an acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler. He offers a keen understanding of Hitler's inner circle and the upper levels of the Nazi regime and he takes us deep inside the command structures of the German military and the state machinery that kept Germany going in the final months of Hitler's rule.

Hitler, of course, is at the centre of Kershaw's account, but the reasons for Germany's intransigence cannot simply be reduced to the whims of a deranged dictator hellbent on dragging his country down with him. Kershaw plays down other factors normally assumed to explain Germany's defiance, such as the Allied demand for unconditional surrender. Instead, he stresses the role of those who did Hitler's bidding and carried out his orders.

"His lingering power was sustained only because others upheld it because they were unwilling, or unable to challenge it," Kershaw writes. "The issue stretches, therefore, beyond Hitler's own intractable personality and his unbending adherence to the absurdly polarised dogma of total victory or total downfall. It goes to the very nature of Hitler's rule, and to the structures and mentalities that upheld it, most of all within the power elite."

The End picks up in the aftermath of the failed attempt on Hitler's life in July 1944, which, Kershaw argues, quashed any hopes of a less destructive settlement. (This is a very big "if", one that Kershaw bets on. Had they succeeded, the plotters, led by Claus von Stauffenberg, might have sought an armistice in the west; they would have done no such thing in the east.) Moving to consolidate his hold over German society, Hitler bestowed enormous powers on a quartet of true believers who would prove essential to keeping the war effort going: Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Albert Speer. Of all these, Speer was the decisive figure: it was his genius for organising factories and weapons plants, where thousands of slave labourers toiled, that kept Germany afloat in the war's final phase.

Kershaw succeeds most when he focuses on the upper ranks of the Nazi power structure. For men such as Bormann, who had cast his lot with Hitler long ago, it was an all-or-nothing gambit; succeed with Hitler, or perish if he fails. But, as Kershaw notes, their fanaticism would have counted for nothing had the Wehrmacht's generals wavered; they didn't. Not all of them loved Hitler, but craven self-interest and loyalty to country kept the generals in line. For them, von Stauffenberg's plot - he was a decorated war hero - was an outrage, a stain on the army's reputation. Alfred Jodl, chief of the Werchmacht operations staff, told Goebbels that his generals would "ruthlessly hunt down the defeatists, putschists and assassination instigators". Still, being a general in Hitler's armies could not have been easy: the Führer, ever erratic, would demand they carry out suicidal orders. In the east, this would prove especially catastrophic, as entire armies were destroyed by the advancing Soviets.

Kershaw is a careful, exacting scholar, but his argument can be nuanced to the point of convolution. He will present his findings - he has carefully sifted through diaries, letters from the front, minutes and other documents - then cautiously back away from a definitive statement. In one letter he quotes, a wounded grenadier, evacuated from the hell of East Prussia, writes: "On no account will we capitulate! That so much blood as has already been spilt in this freedom fight cannot be in vain. The war can and will end in German victory!" Kershaw bathetically concludes: "How representative such attitudes were is impossible to tell."

Doubtless, many more soldiers were driven by fear and pure instinct. In the kill-or-be-killed charnel house of the eastern front, self-preservation trumped ideology and surrender often meant death. The Red Army showed little mercy for German POWs. Indeed, several hundred thousand German troops died while in Soviet hands. Yet German soldiers also fought tenaciously in the west, where they faced far better treatment if captured by the British or the Americans. Kershaw is at pains to show why ordinary Germans did not try to resist their masters. True, the Nazis unleashed unparalleled checks and terroristic repression on the German people. Any defeatist sentiment could lead to a death sentence. Himmler implored Germans to take a hard line against "shirkers", "cowards" and "weaklings". The army rounded up deserters and sent them back to the front.

But, Kershaw argues, these measures cannot alone explain the behaviour of millions of Germans. Germany continued to function with a ridiculous efficiency. Food shortages, social dislocation, a refugee problem of titanic proportions, Allied bombers; nothing could stop the German civil servant from keeping the forms in order. In December 1944, for instance, a Munich police department put in a request for five cleaning buckets destroyed in an air raid and instituted measures for obtaining periodicals from post offices (most of which had been destroyed).

It is not a slur on Kershaw that he cannot fully explain why Germany chose the path of near-destruction. What historian has been able to? For the German public, Hitler's appeal had long faded by early 1945. Much of the country was in ruins, with worse to come. "This was a riven society where individuals looked more and more to their own narrow interests—acquisition of the necessities of life and, above all else, survival," Kershaw writes. There was little to do but tend to oneself. A dwindling few still held out hope that Hitler would save Germany from its enemies; others believed "wonder weapons", such as the V2 rocket, would keep the Allies at bay.

Kershaw waves "structures and mentalities" around like an explanatory wand, but its powers extend only so far. Germany's elites, especially Hitler's generals, were indispensable as the fight ground on. Hitler's popularity may have evaporated and the Nazi party was generally reviled by the German public, but fighting habits die hard. Whatever the reasons, the war in Germany would end with a bang, not a whimper.

Knopf. 291 pp, $26

One hundred years ago this month, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen set off from his base camp in Antarctica for the South Pole, which he reached in December. First to the Pole - he beat his English rival Robert Falcon Scott by several weeks - Amundsen successfully completed what Roland Huntford, the great historian of polar exploration, calls “the last classic journey of terrestrial discovery.’’

Amundsen’s feat was a triumph of technique, planning, and tenacity; men, skis, and sled dogs working in harmony across the most inhospitable terrain on Earth. A man of finely calibrated temperament, Amundsen left nothing to chance. He was exacting about every detail: “If we are to win,’’ he told his men as they prepared their gear, “not a trouser button must be missing.’’ Such meticulousness was only one reason why Amundsen and his team made it to the Pole and back (a 1,400-mile round-trip) with nary a scratch.

His journeys - he was also the first to sail through the treacherous ice pack of the Northwest Passage - have inspired the writer and extreme swimmer Lynne Cox to write “South with the Sun.’’ Timed to mark the centenary of Amundsen’s achievement, this trite and puzzling book is about Amundsen largely in name only. The subtitle - Roald Amundsen, His Polar Exploration and the Quest for Discovery’’ - is grotesquely misleading. While Cox, author of “Swimming to Antarctica,’’ provides superficial accounts of Amundsen’s expeditions, her book is really a memoir attached to the achievements of someone else.

For Cox, Amundsen’s travels serve as an airy metaphor for any physical or mental challenge. But she reduces his example to nostrums so saccharine they would shame a Hallmark card writer. “We are all explorers,’’ she writes, “trying things we have never done before, entering into the unknown of our lives.’’ Or, “Anyone who does anything of significance faces obstacles.’’

Following Amundsen’s journey through the Northwest Passage, Cox makes her way to Greenland and Arctic Canada, where she swims in frigid seas. (Cox herself did not go to Antarctica; a planned trip did not come off for logistical reasons, which she recounts in tedious detail.) “I wanted to write about him and compare his journey with mine, which would be about hundred years later,’’ she tells us. “But there was more to it. I wanted to see how far I could go, try something that caused me to reach further and explore the inner and outer worlds of what a human being could achieve.’’

In these sections, her prose sputters occasionally to life. Swimming off Baffin Island, dodging blocks of ice as she wills her way through 28-degree water, Cox observes how “the supernatural Arctic sun saturated the sound and made the water resonate with energy waves. The sea became fire blue and searing cold.’’ Yet such moments are all too rare here.

Cox’s experiences - she has swum the Bering Strait and the English Channel - are not uninteresting; it’s just that the way she shapes her material is maddening. She is a compulsive name-dropper and is forever calling in favors. She meets with the publisher of The New York Times, among others, a fellow arctic maven. Cox knows a lot of people. But her travel dilemmas and other worries, which include Greenland sharks and jellyfish, pale in comparison with the obstacles Amundsen faced on his dash to the South Pole. Her swims are highly controlled events; minders follow her every move. Amundsen had no backup, no margin for error, which makes his accomplishment all the more remarkable.

The chapters on Amundsen are primer-like, but offer no new reflections on the meaning of his exploits. Cox does succeed, however, in tracing the link between today’s Arctic missions and those of Amundsen. The link is aviation. For all his technical mastery, Amundsen’s scramble to the South Pole was an antique venture; after 1911, the future lay with the airplane. Amundsen conceded the fact: “The old order is changing. Aircraft is the new vehicle for exploration. It is the only machine that can beat the Antarctic.’’ Cox meets up with members of the US Air Force’s 109th Airlift Wing, which provides support to polar scientific missions. Landing a plane on the Antarctic ice cap can be an ordeal; ice, wind, and snow can present fiendish obstacles. GPS and sophisticated satellites are useless at the pole - like Amundsen, Cox notes, pilots still have to navigate by sextant.

“South with the Sun’’ is a missed opportunity. Cox is as worshipful as any apostle, but she never grapples with a central question of the coming centenary. That question is this: Why does the death of Scott, who perished on his return leg from starvation and exposure, echo more loudly through the ages than the triumph of Amundsen? Scott, a damn fool, did nearly everything wrong; yet a kind of heroism radiates from his failure. Amundsen was merely a success.

Ostensibly a study of just one century, Braudel's influential book is much more than that. The usual stuff of history - events, names, dates - takes a back seat to geography, natural history, geology and the slow drip of time, which Braudel endows with an almost mystical force. Still, disquisitions on the role of mountains, plateaus and plains in the Mediterranean world, however beautiful, are not everyone's idea of historical writing.

David Abulafia's The Great Sea might be seen as a forceful counterpoint to Braudel's masterwork. Taking in the entire sweep of Mediterranean history, from 20,000BC until the 21st century, Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history at the University of Cambridge, has written a far more conventional work. This is truly history as one thing after another.

Like an old-fashioned survey course, The Great Sea swells with names and dates - with a focus on high politics, religion, warfare and, above all, commerce. If Braudel almost minimised the human factor, Abulafia sees human initiative as a defining motif of the sea and its history: "The human hand has been more important in moulding the history of the Mediterranean than Braudel was ever prepared to admit."

The Great Sea is deeply learned, and reflects a lifetime of study. Abulafia has synthesised an enormous amount of material: this is an eminently useful book, even if it lacks Braudel's poetry. Abulafia, at times, can sound like a pedantic lecturer, droning on and on at the front of the classroom. (On the diet of sailors, for example, Abulafia observes "the main difference of the Genoese, Venetian and Neapolitan sailors was the balance of elements, with the Venetians receiving rather less biscuit and cheese and much more salted meat ..."). Yet Abulafia's sea of words yields many riches as well.

He ranges far back into the deep history of the sea and its regions. Braudel said of the Mediterranean that it "is not even a single sea, it is a complex of seas", and Abulafia has much to tell us about the Mediterranean's watery adjuncts - the Aegean, Adriatic - and the Tyrrhenian seas - and the primacy of its islands: Crete, Cyprus, Mallorca, Sardinia and Sicily.

Poised between East and West, at the meeting point of Europe, Africa and Asia, the Mediterranean has been an arena of economic and religious exchange between Muslims, Christians and Jews, as well as a bloody battleground for clashing empires. As such, Abulafia writes, the Mediterranean became "the most vigorous place of interaction between different societies on the face of this planet, and it has played a role in the history of human civilisation that has far surpassed any other expanse of sea". He more than backs up this bold claim over the nearly 800 pages of his book.

If documentation on the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean is relatively scant, Abulafia still has much to tell us about the Mycenaean, Minoans and Phoenicians by way of archaeological findings. He is always keen to look out for borrowings and influences; in Abulafia's telling, cultural boundaries were always porous, allowing for influences to spread freely. If the Greeks were justifiably proud of their culture, they owed their alphabet to Phoenicians. And one of the most glittering centres of Hellenic culture was not to be found in the Greek islands at all, but in Alexandria. The city produced some of the greatest figures of Greek science and culture, among them mathematician Euclid and the inventor Archimedes.

Nearly everywhere, Abulafia sees the human hand at work. The Cannanites of Lebanon, who the Greeks dubbed Phoinikes, "Phoencians," brought their culture from the east into the western reaches of the Mediterranean, to Sicily, Sardinia and beyond. They were naval pioneers, and transformed the entire region, establishing one of the great cities of the ancient world, Carthage (which Rome would destroy in the Punic Wars). "The Phoenicians did not simply have a long reach; their activities also had the power to lift the political and economic life of a far-off land to a new level," writes the author. This is an abiding theme of Abulafia's Mediterranean story: how the overseas expansion of various cultures promoted development afar. Phoenician influences mixed with Greek and Etruscan cultures "helping to create interconnections that spanned the entire sea".

Abulafia is at his best describing the role of trade to the region's history, and the rise of trading cities like Alexandria, Venice, Genoa and Pisa. We read of commodities - wine, wheat, olives and oil - being shipped hither and yon. (One of the most unusual wares was the traffic in garum, a stinking fish sauce made of fish innards that was popular during the Roman Empire).

Today, Venice is merely a museum; but its centrality to the history of the Mediterranean is paramount. A way station between east and west, Venice rose on trade in timber, salt and fish. But canny Venetian merchants also cornered the market in luxury goods such as silk, jewels, gold artifacts and saints' relics. One of Abulafia's most pointed anecdotes concerns the theft of St Mark's remains from Alexandria in 829 AD by a group of Venetian traders: they covered their cargo with pork, which deterred Muslim customs officials from taking a closer look. The Venetians, writes Abulafia, created "not just a distinctive city built in the water, but a distinctive culture and a distinctive polity, suspended between western Europe, Byzantium and Islam".

There are a number of remarkable journeys Abulafia recounts in The Great Sea that highlight the crossroads of culture and religion. Take the example of Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Jubayar, who was born in Muslim Spain in 1145.

He set off for Mecca in 1183, and his travels took him to Sicily, Alexandria and the Holy Land and lands that were populated by Muslims but were owned by Frankish crusaders. He travelled on Genoan ships, which also carried Christian pilgrims. The voyages of ibn Jubayar are a wonderful reflection of the mixings and minglings of Abulafia's Mediterranean, as was the world described by the Cairo Genizah, a rich trove of papers that document the varieties of Jewish and Muslim interaction during the era of the Fatimid dynasty. The "Genizah Jews", sailing on Muslim-owned ships, created a commercial empire in the 9th and 10th centuries that stretched from Alexandria to the Spain of the Al-Andalus.

Abulafia does not overlook the role of warfare or religious strife in his account. His chapters on the crusades are hair-raising, and his account of the epic showdown between the Spanish and Ottoman empires in the 16th century, which culminated in the naval battle of Lepanto, are trenchant and concise. For several thousand years, the Mediterranean was arguably the motor of world history. As Abulafia takes his story into the 19th and 20th centuries, the sea loses its centrality. The kind of cultural contacts it fostered we now get online or by air travel. Thus the world, as Abulafia puts it, has itself become one big Mediterranean.

As a historian, Thomas is something of a throwback to another age. He prefers grand narration to theory. Though his work concerns large forces that have shaped the modern world - slavery, imperialism - he keeps human agency at the forefront. He savours the tics of personality, the evocation of events, and carefully wrought sketches of character and place. For the past decade, he has been at work on a trilogy about the rise of Spain's empire in the Americas, which showcases all of these qualities.

In Rivers of Gold (2003), his first volume, Thomas surveyed the beginnings of Spain's empire in the 16th century. It is a remarkable story. In the late 15th century, Spain was barely a state, let alone a world power. By 1530, it had emerged a unified kingdom with a burgeoning overseas empire. Columbus had established a base at Hispaniola in the Indies; Hernando Cortes conquered Mexico (dubbed New Spain); and Spanish conquistadors began trekking southward, towards Peru and beyond.

As Marlowe remarked in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the conquest of the earth is not a very pretty thing when you look into it. The conquistadors operated under the banner of Christianity but they were also driven by greed and glory. They brought African slaves to work on plantations and in mines. Their encounters with indigenous peoples were violent and bloody. Indians were enslaved or killed.

At the end of his first volume, Thomas wrote "[conquistadors] made their conquests with a clear conscience, certain that they were taking with them civilisation, believing that they would in the end permit these new people to leave behind their backward conditions. Who can doubt now that they were right to denounce the idea of religion based on human sacrifice or the simple worship of the sun or the rain?" Thomas will not win favour in certain seminar rooms, but it would be crude to call him an apologist for Spanish imperialism. He doesn't disguise the conquistadors' brutality; he just views it unsentimentally.

The Golden Age, the second instalment of Thomas's trilogy, covers the expansion of Spanish rule in the New World under the rule of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman emperor. Moving between the court of Charles, and Spain's possessions abroad, Thomas describes, with typical power, the exploits of the conquistadors as they explored the Yucatan peninsula, Guatemala, and points south from 1516 onwards. These years would be the height of Spain's Siglo de Oro, or "Golden Century."

While he pays sufficient attention to Cortes and Mexico, Thomas also recounts the journeys of legions of lesser-known conquistadors. At times, the dramatis personae can be bewildering - Thomas is fascinated by genealogical details - but one is struck by the sheer audacity of these journeys. Over unforgiving terrain that even in the 21st century would present difficulties, conquistadors hacked through mosquito-infested swamps and jungles. "The brilliant, brutal, unpredictable, fascinating and brave" Pedro de Alvarado entered Guatemala in the 1520s, demanding that various tribes submit to him. (He earned the sobriquet "Tonatiuh", Son of the Sun). His savagery caused disquiet in Spain, but Alvarado nonetheless proceeded with his conquests.

Other conquistadors found themselves on the receiving end of native reprisals. Pedro de Valdivia, royal governor of Chile and founder of Santiago, met a grim end at the hands of the Araucanian Indians, who had suffered greatly at his hand. He was captured in battle on Christmas Day, 1553. Thomas describes his fate coolly: according to one witness, "Valdivia was disarmed and undressed and then tied up by the Indians. They built a fire in which they roasted slices of his arms cut off with mussel shells and ate them. Other tortures followed till they finally cut off his head."

Valdivia got his start as a lieutenant to perhaps the most illustrious (and infamous) figure on Thomas's pages: Francisco Pizarro. Along with his brothers, Pizarro defeated the Incas in the 1830s, and established Peru as a major component of the Spanish empire. "Like most conquistadors he was quite prepared to be cruel to enemies," Thomas writes of Pizzaro, "and to kill Indians in a ruthless manner to achieve a psychological advantage." With only 200 or so men, Pizarro massacred a numerically superior group of Incas in 1532, capturing Atahualpa, the Incan emperor. Holding him hostage, Pizarro and his men began to loot Peru's gold and silver. Their haul was astonishing: over 13,000 pounds of 22.5 carat gold and 26,000 pounds of silver. Incan jewellery, and other priceless objects, was melted in forges, as Pizarro divided up the spoils among his men.

Pizarro's renown spread in his home country: "Henceforward the magic glint of Peruvian treasure lit the imagination of king, courtiers and the common people." But if Charles filled his coffers with New World gold, we should not assume there was unanimous approval for how the conquistadors went about their business. There was debate about the propriety of killing Indians - or Christianising them. Pope Paul III issued a bull in 1537, "proclaiming Indians should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by their example of good and holy living".

Thomas exactingly (if at times tediously) considers the variety of opinion on these theological matters. The leading figure in the debate about how Indians should be treated was Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican friar and prolific pamphleteer, and an impassioned advocate for indigenous peoples. In A Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), which was presented to Charles, Las Casas claimed that 15 or 20 million Indians had been killed ("a vast exaggeration," says Thomas). He also fulminated against Spanish policy: "All wars which are called conquests are and were very unjust, and are characteristic of tyrannies, not wise monarchies. All the lordships of the Indies we have usurped. For our kings to achieve their principality in the Indies validly and correctly, that is without injustice, would necessarily require the consent of the kings and people concerned."

Charles issued a series of humane reforms - banning the enslavement of Indians and giving them very nominal rights - which, Thomas writes, caused "desasosiego" (disquiet) in New Spain and other colonies. There was resistance from the settlers. Thomas's book ends with Charles trying to bring order to his colonies, struggling against the Reformation in Europe. Whatever the good intentions of Las Casas and his sympathisers, Pizarro and his kind unleashed a kind of rule that could not be contained.

The story of how the modern Middle East was born out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War is well known. With the British and French acting as midwives, the former provinces of this once mighty imperium were put on a (difficult) path to modern statehood. But there was hardly anything inevitable about the inglorious demise of the Ottomans. Though it had been convulsed by internal disputes, the Ottoman Empire was still a formidable power in 1914. But, as so often happens in history, a wrong bet had profound historical consequences. That bet was the alliance with Germany that brought the Turks into the war on the side of the Central Powers. It was a fateful decision. Prodded by the Kaiser (the allure of German marks also helped) the Turkish regime went to war against its historical enemy, Russia. This, in itself, was not an absurd wager. However, the German end of the bargain was an altogether different proposition: taking aim at the British empire and its 100 million Muslim subjects, Wilhelm II cooked up a breathtaking plan to unleash the furies of an Islamic power on the British Raj and Egypt and harness the glories of the Near East to German imperial interests.

The historian Sean McMeekin, in The Berlin-Baghdad Express, his masterful history of this remarkable if preposterous undertaking, calls it the “first ever global jihad”. Historians have tended to downplay the role of pan-Islamic agitation in the First World War, arguing that the Turco-German campaign was marginal to the strategy of the Central Powers. However, McMeekin, who has consulted numerous Turkish and German sources, convincingly puts the plan front and centre, and gives us a fuller, more complex picture of how the Great Powers influenced the future of the Middle East.

It is a story that takes in grotesque misapprehension, outlandish propaganda, sordid compromise, abject failure, and comic — or tragic — outcomes. A professor of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, McMeekin has written a sophisticated, if sometimes tendentious, account that gives us a much broader view of a story whose echoes persist into the present day: the efforts by western powers to exert influence in the Middle East, and the way in which those efforts — often involving attempts to marshal the force of religious fervour — have so reliably backfired.

The Berlin-Baghdad Express is also a phenomenally entertaining narrative. Featuring a dramatis personae that puts Indiana Jones to shame, McMeekin's book opens up a window on to the vanished, all-but-forgotten world of German Orientalism and the band of scholar-adventurers who fanned out across the Middle East to win converts to the cause. Lawrence of Arabia has won all the glory, but these agents were, to a man, every bit his equal. (It's refreshing to read about a moment in 20th-century history when Germans acted no better or worse than their British and French adversaries.) Travelling to the most forbidding regions of the Muslim world, where no infidel was welcome, they carried out their briefs with élan and derring-do, though with little success in the end.

Indeed, McMeekin offers, among other things, a brilliant exposé of a geopolitical disaster. From the start, there was something unseemly about the Kaiser's embrace of Islam — “Hajji Wilhelm” was always a man of sudden, contradictory, enthusiasms. After a visit to Jerusalem in 1898, he declared to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, that “My personal feeling in leaving the holy city was that I felt profoundly ashamed before the Moslems and that if I had come there without any Religion at all I certainly would have turned Mahomettan!” (At the same time, he was enthusing to Theodore Herzl about Zionism.) But the Kaiser thought he also had found a weapon: “the Mahometans were a tremendous card” in the game against “the certain meddlesome Power!”— Great Britain.

Thus began Germany's ardent courtship of the Sublime Porte and Sultan Abdul Hamid. Building a railroad from Constantinople to Baghdad to Basra — the eponymous express — would become one linchpin of German strategy. The other would be exploiting the symbolic potential of the Caliphate to stir the passions of Muslims. Under any political circumstance, this was a risky move. And the Germans weren't the only ones with their eyes on the Caliphate: the British entertained notions of detaching it from the Ottoman Sultan and moving it to Mecca. They lavished funds on the Sherifiate and Ibn Saud's Wahhabist legions in an attempt to buy their support. (As one leader writer put it in a pro-British Egyptian paper, “it is Mecca, not Constantinople, which is the centre of the Muslim faith. It is towards the Kaabah, not towards the St Sophia, that the Moslem turns his eyes as he prays”). About this faintly absurd jousting amongst the Great Powers, competing to prop up the long-expired authority of the Caliphate, McMeekin writes, “It was like a race to the reactionary bottom, to see which ‘infidel' power could conjure up the purest strain of fundamentalist Islam.”

Helping to whip up passions was one of history's most unlikely jihadists, Baron Max von Oppenheim, who directed the Kaiser's “jihad bureau” for the duration of the war. The scion of a Jewish banking family, an archaeologist, writer, and veteran Near East hand, Oppenheim thundered that Muslims “should know that from today the Holy War has become a sacred duty and that the blood of the infidels in the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity”. (Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians were granted exceptions, of course.)

Oppenheim supervised a crack team of Orientalists, among them Alois Musil, cousin of the novelist Robert, who trekked to central Arabia in 1915 to enlist Arab tribal sheikhs, and Oskar von Niedermayer, who made a perilous journey across the Persian desert to spur the Emir of Afghanistan into attacking the Indian Raj. Despite the effusions of pious rhetoric, the Turco-German plan foundered badly. McMeekin is at his best explaining why, as a strategic adjunct to the war, the “jihad” amounted to very little. In the two resounding Turkish victories over British forces, at Gallipoli and Kut-El-Amara, Islamic sentiments counted for nothing on the battlefield; tenacity and superior tactics did.

Almost everywhere — Persia, the Shia strongholds of southern Mesopotamia, Afghanistan and the Hejaz — German agents found themselves contending with endless logistical traps. With the British Navy in control of the seas, the still incomplete railway took on a vital importance. There was simply no way for the Ottomans to ship arms and materiel across vast distances to supply their would-be allies. The “jihad”, in actuality, turned into a series of cash transactions, with the Germans (and British) resorting to subventions, financial blandishments, and outright bribery. For their support, the Turks themselves asked for millions of marks; in Afghanistan, the Emir “demanded from Berlin a lump sum of £10 million sterling, the equivalent of some $5 billion today”.

The Germans — and British — both exploited and misunderstood the issue of the Caliphate. Shia clerics were never going to fall in behind a Sunni Caliphate, whose authority they would never recognise. And, besides, the Caliphate was a nearly moribund institution in 1914. As McMeekin explains, the Caliphate was not analogous to the papacy; it was a “political-military power” backed up by superior force of arms and Ottoman military might. And even this counted for little in the Arab holy lands of the Hejaz, where the Ottomans were unable to put down a revolt by the Emir of Mecca in 1916 (on which the British lavished several billions, in 2010 dollars). The uprising by blood relatives of the Prophet rendered null and void any remaining authority of the Caliphate.

Though McMeekin frequently lapses into cliché (“The Syrian and Mesopotamian stretches on the other side of the mountains were no picnic either”), he is a vivid, confident stylist with a keen eye for the farcical anecdote. During an attack on the Suez Canal, Bedouin tribesmen shouting “Allahu Akhbar” give away Turkish positions to the British; in Constantinople, it turned out that “the lead holy war writer in the Turkish press, ‘Mehmed Zeki Bey, ' was actually a Romanian Jewish conman who had recently done a turn running a bordello in Buenos Aires.” McMeekin writes equally as well on the horrors of war in the Ottoman provinces and the grim fate of Armenians in 1915-1916.

But for all his trenchancy, McMeekin overstates his case, and, in doing so, fails to explain what, exactly, we are to make of “Germany's historic role in the Middle East”. Looking back to the First World War from the vantage point of a world obsessed with radical Islam of the bin Ladenist variety, McMeekin argues that “the Kaiser's promotion of pan-Islam, while a strategic failure in the World War, threw up flames of revolutionary jihadism as far afield as Libya, Sudan, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, Iran, and Afghanistan, which never entirely died down after the war.” Yet McMeekin's notion of “revolutionary jihadism” is off-key, and he skips a beat in his argument. As he forcefully reminds us in his epilogue, “Wilhelmine Germany was also the spiritual and political home of Zionism”, which was an ethno-nationalist movement. As the Middle East moved from protectorates and mandates to independent nation states, nationalist movements set the terms of political debate. The revolutionary jihadism of today, in fact, emerged only after the collapse of Nasser's secular pan-Arabism. Kaiser Wilhelm's “jihad” against Britain — foolhardy, ambitious, and fantastically enthralling in hindsight — casts precious little light on the problem of contemporary religious extremism.

The Cold War was both an era of armed peace and global violence. The United States and the Soviet Bloc may have avoided the nuclear annihilation that many feared, but the rest of the world saw little peace between 1946 and 1989. The chilling concept of Mutual Assured Destruction added a sinister novelty to what was, in essence, a simple continuation of the geopolitics of imperial rivalry that have been a hallmark of the modern age. Europe was divided, but not in ruins; the actual wars of the Cold War were fought in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, as the United States and the USSR shot at each other by proxy.

In retrospect, the long duration of the Cold War was perhaps not a surprise; but its quick end, when the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union fell with a sudden whoosh, caught many off guard. Grey, dreary, and oppressive, the Soviets nonetheless showed indomitable staying power over the years, crushing dissent when they had to -- in Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968 -- and alternately threatening and courting the West. Though the "war" ended two decades ago, it continues to define our sense of the latter half of the 20th century, and its ideas and stances have not yet ceased to influence the outlook of its former participants. The divisions within the West over the battle against communism remain stark, and the big questions -- What accounted for the Soviet downfall? How did the West prevail? -- are still a matter for fierce argument among the ageing Cold warriors still with us.

The intensity of these long-distant debates is more than apparent in the maddeningly idiosyncratic new book by the British historian Norman Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies. As a disinterested general overview of the Cold War, Stone's book is of dubious value. His account is, as the subtitle explains, "a personal history". The former Oxford professor of modern history and now director of the Russian-Turkish Center at the University of Bilkent, Turkey, Stone is a legendarily colourful character. (At Oxford, he conducted tutorials over billiards and glasses of Scotch). Vehemently opinionated and mordantly witty, Stone's personality barrels across the Atlantic at hurricane force.

His history lessons come with plenty of ad-hominem thunderbolts: John F Kennedy was "a hairdresser's Harvard man"; "[Jimmy] Carter's regime symbolised the era. It was desperately well-meaning. It jogged; it held hands everywhere it went with its scrawny wife"; "Nancy Reagan was a face lift too far," and so on.

However, such quips distract from the seriousness of Stone's often trenchant analysis. Stone, who is fluent in Hungarian, Polish, Czech and German among other tongues, is well-equipped to report from the trenches of this global struggle. He is a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher (who emerges, unsurprisingly, as the great heroine of this tale), but he is no end-of-history triumphalist. He says Marxism had much to recommend for analysing peasant economies of the postcolonial third world; he just vigorously disagrees with the prescriptions. Though he salutes "the extraordinary vigour of the capitalist world", one of his themes is how the Western alliance tended to fumble economic issues. For a time, it was the Soviet Union and Communism that seemed to have the answers.

In the immediate years after the Second World War, the British Empire, exhausted and financially prostrate, surrendered its place as a global power, creating an imperial vacuum into which the United States and the Soviet Union quickly moved -- leading Stone to dub the whole mess "the war of the British succession". The Allies had little claim on checking Stalin, whose armies had suffered immensely in the brutal struggle for the Eastern Front. He would have a sphere of influence in Europe, and his Communist allies in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia took power, however ruthlessly. In Asia, Mao triumphed in China and Ho Chi Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. The US contested these advances, in Europe with defence guarantees and monies in the form of the Marshall Plan, and in East Asia with armed interventions on the Korean peninsula and Vietnam. Britain's last stab at imperial assertion, meanwhile, was the utter disaster at Suez in 1956.

But in Stone's telling, it is economics, not armaments and military manoeuvres, that take pride of place. His vignettes on the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis have the feel of a school primer. But on the economic issues confronting the West, Stone mounts a bold, if not altogether persuasive, argument. For Stone, the spectre haunting the West was not communism, but Keynsianism. America and Europe boomed through the 1950s and 1960s. In Western Europe, it seemed, social democracy could deliver the goods, literally: France had refrigerators and West Germany, washing machines. "Nato developed its own financial military complex," he writes, "and the central banks were part of it."

Still, financial arrangements in the Atlantic world were ever precarious. The dollar -- and its crucial adjunct, cheap oil -- underpinned the whole system, but by the end of the 1960s, this hard-won stability was starting to break apart. The United States, pouring money into the war in Vietnam and into LBJ's Great Society programmes, unleashed waves of inflationary pressures that, combined with oil shocks of the 1970s, would bring about a sea change for the Western economies. Inflation was the genie unleashed from the bottle, and getting it back in would vex governments across the Atlantic world.

Reviewing the decade, Stone finds little good to say about this turn in the West. It had become "extraordinarily self-indulgent". He approves of the coup in Chile that brought Augusto Pinochet to power (with not a little bloodshed) and the economic reforms the General put into place after seizing the presidency.

He commends Helmut Schmidt's gestures to the USSR and East Germany -- the so-called "Ostpolitik" -- and generally rhapsodises about the performance of the German economy, but for Britain his scorn is unrelenting. "Since 1815 Germans had been asking why they were not English. After 1950, the question should have been the other way about: why was it preferable to be German?" America's central partner in the Atlantic alliance was in thrall to the unions -- Stone hates them -- and spent money ontoo generous a welfare state: "The overall Atlantic crisis was displayed at its worst in England." (He refers to nationalised industries as "a sort of non-violent protection racket.") Stone spends a great deal of time in trade ministries looking at currency flows and trade imbalances, but here misses an opportunity to look at the broader intellectual contest about economics and society.

Stone does not have much to say about the social history of these decades, or the ideas that animated it. He is scathing about the student movement of the 1960s -- the expansion of universities, he suggests, was a mistake -- but he pays very little attention to debates that played out in magazines, journals and op-ed pages. If the Cold War was, in fact, a kind of intramural argument within the West about how best to organise society and politics -- whose roots date back to the same Enlightenment -- Stone acknowledges it only incidentally, by focusing so relentlessly on the disputes within the capitalist bloc. Thatcher's heroism, in his account, has less to do with her opposition to communism than her defeat of the moderate Tory "wets" and the unions inside Britain.

His disjointed narrative attains a certain momentum only with the arrival of the Iron Lady, "who knew when to be Circe and when to be the nanny from hell". Stone is a partisan, and he cheerleads for the supply-side economics favoured by the prime minister and her American partner Ronald Reagan; he approvingly cites Reagan's quip about the US government, "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it." This, in a nutshell, is what strikes Stone as wrong with the welfare state economics of the West.

Stone's account ends rather abruptly, with a whimper, not a bang. He hazards no thoughts about the legacies of the Cold War, its metaphysics and the habits of mind it spawned, and their implications for Europe and the rest of the world. For Stone, it is enough to say that the 1980s "had been the most interesting, by far, of the post-war decades". A united Europe, the crisis in Greece notwithstanding, is a successful by-product of the Cold War's end; yet the legacy of the Cold War is still, in some senses only coming into shape.

On the calendar of modern revolution, three great dates are marked: 1776, 1789, and 1917. From these three revolutions -- American, French and Russian -- the shape of the modern world seemed to have been formed; each proclaimed a new vision of state and society, made a radical break with the past, and claimed to stand at the forefront of history. America's founders established a republic and tested the viability of democracy; France's revolutionaries beheaded a king and promoted the rights of man, unleashing a revolutionary cycle that transformed Europe; Russian Bolsheviks proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat and the end of capitalism.

The English Revolution of 1688, which saw the Catholic James II overthrown by his son-in-law, the Dutch Protestant William of Orange, would seem to have no place in this datebook of social upheaval. This "revolution" founded no new state; it did not resound with slogans like Liberte, égalité, fraternité; and it certainly ran with less blood than did the streets of Leningrad. England's Glorious Revolution simply saw the swap of one king for another -- hardly an unusual transaction in 17th century Europe.

This is not to say that King James II failed to provoke the discontent of his subjects: he was a heavy-handed ruler who placed Catholic allies in important posts, ran roughshod over Parliament and deployed a standing army across England, forcing his subjects to board them in pubs and inns. But whether his overthrow was worthy of the word "revolution" remains a matter of some debate. It has been described as a provincial happening, a back-room deal hashed out between aristocrats, a mild constitutional kerfuffle with a pleasantly bloodless resolution.

Edmund Burke -- who in his Reflections on the Revolution in France contrasted the sweet reasonableness of 1688 with the violent chaos of 1789 -- helped establish the template by which the Glorious Revolution would be judged: a peaceable affair, even by English standards. Later historians buttressed Burke's contention that what really happened in 1688 was really no revolution at all. The locus classicus of a Glorious Unrevolution was put forth by Thomas Babington Macaulay: "To us who have lived in the year 1848," he wrote in his History of England, "it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, with so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of revolution."

Yet this apparently uneventful transfer of power concealed profound alterations in the relationship between the English crown and its subjects, and set into motion the formation of a new kind of modern state, whose characteristics -- vigorous promotion of economic development, broad religious tolerance, and free competition among political interests -- still define liberal democracies today.

In his magisterial new book (for once, this overused adjective is warranted), the historian Steve Pincus takes aim at the traditional narrative of the Glorious Revolution, and sets out to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was more than worthy of the name: a revolution that was contentious, sometimes violent and even bloody, that pitted two radical factions against one another and transformed England.

1688: The First Modern Revolution is one of the most ambitious works of history to appear in recent years -- a radical reinterpretation of events that intends not merely to update and improve prior accounts but to vanquish them conclusively. The book is a marvel of scholarship: Pincus's footnotes bristle with references to a vast range of archival material alongside the latest research in European economic, religious and political history. His focus -- too much so at times -- is on how history is written, as much as on the events in question, and the result reads at times more like a dense work of political sociology than a narrative history in the mould of Macaulay. But Pincus, evidently obsessed with our need to rethink the events of 1688, has fired an invigorating shot into the otherwise docile realm of Stuart history. Though he too often abandons the subtlety of argument for the force of harangue, his deep learning, and his fearless questioning of received wisdom, more than redeem the book's flaws.

Pincus demonstrates that by the second half of the century, England was already a land in flux: commerce was booming, foreign trade was on the rise; the English were moving to cities, where coffeehouses buzzed with the latest intelligence from abroad. The country was modernising at a rapid clip, and the revolution, as Pincus describes it, was in essence a battle -- a fierce one -- over the terms of that modernisation. James II, who in the accounts of Macaulay and many other historians appears as nothing more than a mad Catholic tyrant, was in fact a forward-looking ruler with his own vision for England's future, one drawn from the absolutist rule of his cousin, France's Louis XIV. James, Pincus writes, "did everything he could to create a modern, rational, centralised Catholic state" -- and he was ruthless in its implementation, cracking down on dissent and spying on his enemies, in effect creating "a very modern surveillance state".

When James first took the throne in 1685, he had the widespread support of the English people. What eventually roused his enemies, Pincus argues, was not simple anti-Catholicism, but opposition to his aspirations for a "universal monarchy" along absolutist lines. The origins of the Glorious Revolution, in Pincus's account, lay in a broader European debate over the meaning of liberty. "The struggle that did so much to define the thinking of the revolutionaries in 1688-89," he writes, "was a struggle to protect European and English national liberties against an aspiring universal monarch, not a war of religion." Rather than a provincial tussle over monarchy and religion in England, this was a conflict with a secular and international dimension, a revolution whose central plank was liberty for mankind, not merely for the English.

Alongside the lofty banner of liberty -- or driving it forward -- was a concurrent struggle over the economic direction of England, whose results would prove even more definitive for the shape of the world to come. England's dynamic economy drove new political concerns into the open. "The political economic programme of the revolutionaries privileged urban and commercial values," Pincus writes, and gave rise to Lockean notions about the social contract, religious toleration, and a belief in the free circulation in information. James's opponents, as Pincus notes, came from a variety of backgrounds -- from peasants to aristocrats -- but it was the country's burgeoning commercial classes that played the strongest role in shaping the economic agenda after the revolution, pushing for "the possibilities of unlimited economic growth based on the creative potential of human labour." This was not a revolution against the state but one determined to harness state power in the pursuit of economic expansion. In place of the Gallic absolutism pursued by James, England's growing merchant classes and their political spokesmen turned their eyes to Holland and a "Dutch model" of economic innovation, commercial prosperity and political openness.

If what ensued in the Glorious Revolution was not quite an apocalyptic confrontation between world views, the clash of these rival programs was divisive and actually quite bloody. (In one skirmish between Williamite and royalist forces, more troops were killed than in the massacre of the Champs de Mars, one of the bloodiest episodes of the French Revolution). But that neglected violence is not what makes 1668 qualify as a "real" revolution in Pincus's mind. What justifies the term are the ramifications that unfolded in the decades to come, in which the Whigs and Tories jockeyed for position and contested the implications of the changes they had wrought, further reiterating one of the underlying principles of the revolution -- the free competition of political interests.

A recognisable outline of the modern liberal state took shape in the aftermath of 1688. England fashioned a kind of parliamentary monarchy, enshrining explicit checks on the line of royal descent (no more Catholic kings) and controls on royal income. The ground was also laid for England's rise as a commercial superpower, with the establishment of the Bank of England, which expanded credit for the growing mercantile classes and financed England's wars against France.

"The Revolution of 1688-89 was the culmination of a long and vitriolic argument about how to transform England into a modern nation," Pincus writes. He suggests that later generations took the achievements of the Glorious Revolution for granted. With the passage of time, it boomed less louder, and its effects were perhaps subtler. But the argument had hardly ended. The Glorious Revolution inaugurated a new phase in history, in which commerce supplanted landed wealth as the ultimate guarantor of economic success, and the "Dutch model" became the way of the world. Though the later revolutions in America and France would revise the terms of the liberal state -- the first toward democracy, the second toward equality -- the world made by 1688, as Pincus so adroitly demonstrates, is the one in which we still live today.

But the second coming of American realism struck out past the well-manicured lawns of tony Westchester and went down market, into Appalachia, the deep South, out West, and beyond. The movement, such as it was, earned the sobriquets "dirty realism" and "Kmart realism," and if there is any one writer associated with the style it is Raymond Carver, whose influential collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love have been credited with reviving the fortunes of the short form in the 1970s and '80s. Carver inspires an intense—at times disconcerting—piety in his admirers. For a decade after his major publications, it seemed almost every young writer wanted to be the next Carver (graduates of programs like the Iowa Writers' Workshop should probably fork over royalties to the Carver estate: His hardscrabble tales launched a thousand MFAs). However, even a cursory scan of his biography—the booze, the infidelities, the serial bankruptcies, and the death at the height of his fame—leaves one with a sense of desolation as strong as any evoked by his famously gloomy stories.

It is said that Carver enlisted his sufferings in the service of his craft. It's an almost comically noble sentiment, one that Carol Sklenicka questions little in her biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Her nearly six-hundred-page account buckles under a relentless accumulation of close-up detail; the biographer of this master of minimalism is a maximalist, ever ready with a histrionic flourish. (About his alcoholism, Sklenicka writes, "There was one problem he couldn't leave behind. The elephant in the room, the secret he couldn't face himself, grew bigger by the day.") She frames her narrative as a struggle between art and life, with her subject stranded in between.

Sklenicka provides a full record of Carver's childhood in Washington's Yakima Valley—he was the son of a lumber-mill worker—and his slow ascent as a writer. He had no connections to any literary establishment, and his long apprenticeship, when he worked a series of low-end jobs and contributed to tiny literary magazines, was nothing if not dogged. His career is inextricably linked to the rise of the writing workshop—as both a student and a teacher, Carver was in and out of writing programs—and the rise of the slickly marketed paperback original. (Along with Jay McInerney, Carver was one of the first authors featured in the Vintage Contemporaries series.) But some twenty years after his death, vexed issues about the way he was edited still bedevil Carver's reputation. Even so, the Library of America has gathered his two most famous volumes of short fiction, along with bits and pieces of memoirs, alternate versions of stories, and Beginners, the manuscript version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

What We Talk About, published in 1981, is undoubtedly Carver's most influential book. Despite the writer's blue-collar origins and the alleged verisimilitude of his characterizations—the fractured marriages, put-upon waitresses, and unemployed layabouts—his fiction lacks a certain particularity. If his stories are dotted with the place names of California and the Pacific Northwest (see, for example, the story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"), there is not much that distinguishes him as a "western" writer; he was a pioneer of Anywheresville, USA. Carver lived for many years in Cupertino, a bland place that's not quite suburb, not quite city, so it's no surprise that his settings typically lack the social density and sense of locale that distinguish much traditional realism. This isn't a bad thing; writers aren't sociologists. But Carver's reputation as the laureate of the disenfranchised requires qualification; the class he explored wasn't social so much as it was psychological—the emotionally indigent.

About Carver's fiction, Irving Howe once mused, "It's a meager life that Mr. Carver portrays, without religion or politics or culture, without the shelter of class or ethnicity, without the support of strong folkways or conscious rebellion." Yet this observation perhaps missed the point. In the story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Carver homes in on what the narrator calls "human noise." It's a potent phrase—hinting at something inhuman, that the things that come out of our mouths are less than words, a kind of detritus of the soul. Indeed, this savagely mordant four-character roundabout is a tour de force of boozy talk—two couples whose attempts to talk about love take them on what seem to be necessary detours through death, violence, and suicide. Not that Cheever lacked for drunken banter, but Carver was up to something different: You might call this realism, but it's pushing at something else altogether, toward a dizzying void.

Questions about Carver's intent continue to swirl around these iconic stories and around the role played by his editor, Gordon Lish, who considerably reshaped Beginners into the volume we know as What We Talk About. How one views this controversy depends in part on what you think of the author-editor relationship. As the celebrated fiction editor of Esquire in the early '70s, Lish got Carver into the glossies and later edited two collections. Playing the role of domineering enthusiast, the editor made the struggling author, who had a few prize-winning stories to his credit, into a name brand.

The partnership was hardly unprecedented. Radical edits are nothing new in American literature—Maxwell Perkins shaped the unruly manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald's insistence that Hemingway cut the entire first chapter of The Sun Also Rises was on the mark, and The Waste Land would be very different without Ezra Pound's blue pencil. Lish, too, was often the better craftsman. He coined startling turns of phrase and ably mimicked the jagged rhythms of speech—"human noise" is his, and Carver's "I began to feel sorry for him right away" became the memorable "My God, Rita, those were fingers" in "Fat." He cut characters' backstories and pared down some tales into short-shorts that actually gave birth to their own subgenre. He sharpened dialogue in angular ways that almost detached voices from their speakers, leaving readers adrift amid the verbal thrusts and parries. Indeed, the process, by which the editor excavated an intent latent in the author's prolix draft, might be dubbed Carver reading Lish reading Carver. As the notes and letters accompanying their exchanges attest, the exercise filled the writer with a mixture of horror and awe. He nearly stopped the presses on What We Talk About, but he ultimately signed off on publication—an important point to keep in mind during the present-day debate over his authorship.

Sklenicka's accounts of these episodes are surprisingly evenhanded. Lish is not the bad guy, nor is Carver the dupe. Carver was ambivalent, but he knew what Lish could do —to his editor, he wrote, "I want them to be the best possible stories, and I want them to be around for a while. . . . So open the throttle. Ramming speed." Lish needed no such invitation; he had been tweaking Carver's writing for years. What We Talk About is an amplification, albeit in extreme form, of something that began in 1976 with Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The Lish effect is there, but more subtly. If he took a scalpel to Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, he employed a machete on the manuscript of What We Talk About. Carver did publish alternate versions of certain stories, yet those versions do little to convince us that Lish was a malign influence. Take "The Bath," a story about a boy struck by a car on his birthday, which also appears in Cathedral (1983) and elsewhere as "A Small, Good Thing." The collaborative version ("The Bath") is menacing; much of its resolution is withheld by a perverse narrative cruelty. Does the boy live or die? For Lish, closure was for losers. In his conclusion, the parents get a call from the hospital—"'Scotty,' the voice said. 'It is about Scotty,' the voice said. 'It has to do with Scotty, yes'"—and that's all we know. It's the human noise again, buzzing in our ears.

The Lish-edited collections included in the Library of America edition are now canonical; at the time of their publication, they catapulted Carver to fame. But it was no deal with the devil, as Sklenicka concludes: "The success of What (orchestrated, for worse or better, by Lish) had unlocked doors for Carver. He was more than ready to walk through them." Carver did so, but his experience with Lish pricked at him. For Cathedral, he declared his independence—he would accept only minor edits from Lish, nothing more. These stories are careful, empathetic, and ultimately conventional. Not reputation makers, not fiction that brands a style. With his powerful instinct for etching heartache, Carver would have written worthy stories with or without his editor. Whether we would be reading that work in an edition designed for the ages is another question, one that's as unanswerable as it is provocative.

The sum of these fears — or their apotheosis — is the belief that civilisation (read: "the West") is fated to decline, to be subdued from without or collapse from within. This too, is not a new idea. History, it is true, has often been narrated as a Whiggish tale of continual progress — that "It's getting better all the time", as Sir Paul McCartney put it. But this uplifting Enlightenment sentiment has always been opposed by a darker view, one that stresses the cycles of history, the tendency for what has risen to fall again — a physics of decline with its own martial undertones, including the unmistakable implication that the West, fat and happy with the fruits of its technological and cultural sophistication, is blithely tottering on the brink of oblivion.

Few thinkers savaged Europe's faith in progress with the ferocity of Friedrich Nietzsche, who thought that anything called "progress" was a mere illusion — if there was even such a thing, he suggested, its flowering could only give way to dissolution. Nietzsche's ideas were carried into the 20th century by Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West became the ur-text of declinism in the 1920s. About history, Spengler concluded: "I see no progress, no goal no path for humanity."

Spengler's pessimism squared nicely with the gloomy mood of Europe after the First World War. If his book appears now as a curious artefact of its time, it helped to establish a template of decline — and a rhetoric to evoke its inevitability — that endures today, a kind of civilisational pessimism that exists at all points among the ideological spectrum; the declinists of the left and right obsess over very different threats, but the essential dynamic transcends politics.

In his suggestive new book The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, the distinguished historian Richard Overy looks back to the time of Spengler to explore how the paradox of progress and peril consumed almost every aspect of British society in the two decades between the First and Second World Wars. His subject matter, Overy writes, "is in no sense an insular history". As America does today, Britain then considered itself the hub of western civilisation — and its putative crisis was cast by intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians and scientists as a "crisis of civilisation", tout court. Fear and doubt, then as now, were pervasive — over the resilience of capitalism, the health of the population, the direction of society and, above all, about whether Europe would soon destroy itself in another violent conflagration. The discourse Overy surveys was widespread: "There were few areas of intellectual endeavour, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, that were not affected in some form or other by the prevailing paradigms of impending decline and collapse," he writes. "The sense of crisis was not specific to any one generation... nor was it confined to one political or social outlook."

Overy has gathered a rich harvest of material — pamphlets, broadsides, books, lectures, newsreels and radio broadcasts — from a diverse assortment of English writers and thinkers, among them EM Forster, the brothers Aldous and Julian Huxley, HG Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and the historian Arnold Toynbee. If the world was indeed ending, there was as much eloquence from these figures as there was gloom about their predicament. (After a health crisis in 1936, Forster mused that he was being nursed "with so much kindness and sense," despite living in a "civilisation which has neither kindness or sense.")

Few did more to establish the tenor of the era than Arnold Toynbee, Britain's own Spengler. In Toynbee's view, all civilisations hewed to the same pattern, which Overy describes as "creative expansion, mechanistic consolidation, internal decay prompted by cultural stagnation, social division, and a final universal Caesarism". Just as past civilisations — Mayan, Roman, Greek — had seen glory and then disappeared from the face of the earth, the West would meet a similar fate. His ideas found a receptive audience in the inter-war years. Lecture halls featured talks on topics like "The Decay of Moral Culture" and the poetic if overwrought "The Smoke of Our Burning". Death was on everyone's minds — in 1924, one lecturer asked "Why not Commit Suicide?" (Overy does not say how the question was answered). In the mid-1930s, John Boulting (of the famed filmmaking duo the Boulting Brothers), recoiled after a trip to London, where he found only "dirt, disorder and a terrifying din", another sign of a society plunging "headlong, blindly and almost eagerly towards a gigantic carnival of self-extermination".

Today, this erudite hysteria may seem unintentionally funny, the hyper-articulate ravings of terrified intellectuals. But Overy notes that these views were hardly outside the mainstream: Britain had been overcome by a tidal wave of despair, and as the 1920s gave way to the years of the Slump, the agitation only increased. Writers fed the public's appetite for the literature of crisis — The Intelligent Man's Guide Through the World Chaos, by the socialist writer GDH Cole, sold some 50,000 copies in 1932. (Whatever the state of British civilisation, these years proved a boon to the publishers like Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, and Victor Gollancz, the proprietor of the Left Book Club.)

Overy contends that this was not merely a time of escalating and overheated rhetoric: the prophets of decline were deadly sincere, looking to science, economics, medicine and history to construct elaborate proofs of the nearing of the end. If, as has been suggested, this was primarily the discourse of an educated elite, whose views "reflected the prejudices and the expectations of the educated classes", the theories of decline found a wide and eager audience — they flourished, Overy writes, "in the first real age of mass communication".

The Morbid Age is a showcase for the brightest minds of the era, yet the fruits of all this fevered fretting were often less than palatable. The discourse of crisis was extreme in tone; the terms used to describe the state of Britain were invariably apocalyptic and millennial. Moderate voices were drowned by a series of emotive keywords that recur again and again in the literature Overy surveys: decay, menace, disease, barbarism, chaos, descent, sick. Even among some of the most progressive thinkers of the age, as Overy shows, the diagnosis that British civilisation was approaching collapse bore a deeply reactionary tint.

Perhaps the most sinister manifestation of this current was the intellectual vogue for eugenics. The rise and fall of civilisations could, in part, be explained by theories of racial purity. In Britain, many concluded that the wrong people — the poor and the mentally handicapped — were giving birth at a rate that threatened to engulf society in a wave of mediocrity. "We are getting larger and larger dregs at the bottom of our national vats," concluded one biologist. To counter the trend, the British Eugenics Society, whose members included Julian Huxley and Keynes, promoted a campaign of sterilisation that looked very much like a similar programme implemented in Nazi Germany.

This ugly esteem for eugenics was but one manifestation of the great faith laid at the feet of science, whose advances were widely believed to represent the only possible hope for salvation. "Confidence in the power of science to deliver what was appropriate for modern society was widespread" writes Overy. "In turn science enjoyed an exceptional power of suggestion among the widespread public, which followed the debates on issues of real contemporary significance closely."

But the sword of science cut two ways: for Toynbee, in fact, it was "scientific technique" that allowed him to verify the impending decline of the West, while others turned to the new protocols of psychoanalysis in an attempt to pinpoint society's weaknesses. If patients could be put on the couch, why not entire civilisations? Used properly, Freud's innovation might be used to cure "the insanity of nations", as one psychoanalyst said, and even put an end to war. But psychoanalytic discourse, with its emphasis on irrational desire and aggression, only seemed to confirm that nations would act recklessly.

Science, alas, ratified the fears it was meant to assuage: in the end, Overy suggests, it endorsed the view that was already becoming widespread, in which war was an inevitable feature of modern life. Conflict was no longer to be explained as the result of "ambitions or miscalculations of a handful of politicians and generals." Instead, war came to be seen as "something alien and external, endowed with an inexorable force which seemed to obey its own natural laws"—ones beyond the control of human agency.

"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality," wrote Joseph Conrad. It's a sentiment that Overy almost certainly shares. His book, he says, is a warning, and it tells us to be wary of men and women who come bearing theories about the end of civilisation. A society's obsession with its own destruction, he suggests, can actually hasten the outcome it seeks to avoid: Britain, of course, soon got the very war that it had for so long dreaded. The obsession with preventing war paradoxically made war more possible: "the more war was discussed and the more lurid the imagery invoked to describes its effects, the more war itself seemed to assume a solid shape in the popular mind and the narrower and more extreme became the options between an unattainable state of peace and an all-too attainable state of catastrophic war." (It was enough for one critic to protest: "Stop talking about war. If we talk about war much longer we may talk it into existence.)

For Overy, narratives of civilisational decline, in 1930s Britain or 2000s America, cannot but be overblown. "The constant theme of civilisation in crisis," he concludes, "if repeated often enough and in different contexts, develops an explanatory power that does not have to take account of any existing disjuncture between historical reality and the language of threat." Much of the material Overy surveys in The Morbid Age had a risibly short shelf life. But the language of threat, alas, is for all time.

This image, carefully fixed by Cheever himself, began dissolving with the publication of Falconer (1977), a prison novel of shocking force and lurid sexuality that awed many of his admirers and hinted at some kind of personal liberation. Its rapturous treatment of homoerotic desire and its horrific passages on addiction suggested Cheever was publicly owning up to something—and, in many ways, he was. In 1991, the publication of The Journals of John Cheever laid bare a life of prodigious drinking, infidelity, marital strife, lust, impotence, and agonized bisexuality. "The most wonderful thing about life seems to be that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction," mused Cheever, who did his best to refute his own proposition. (Among other things, the Journals are an essential document in the history of alcoholism.) In this private record, Cheever emerges a man beset by a welter of repression, resentments, and infinite reservoirs of despair. ("Shaken with liquor, self-doubts dimmed slightly by a Miltown, I board the nine o'clock. I am in misery. Every man on the train seems richer, more virile and intelligent than I.") There are bursts of his trademark lyricism, filled with the pleasure he took in observing the natural world—"the smell of burning holly and hemlock is like a vital perfume of life"—but for every small portion of joy, there is a greater share of desolation.

In his hefty biography Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey brings these disclosures further out of the shadows, training the megawatt glare of the authorized life onto Cheever's agonies and indiscretions. The prospect we are offered is a bleak one. If Cheever brought a zest and professionalism to the craft of the short story—the New Yorker style owes much to his efforts—he became positively consumed with creating the persona "John Cheever," a vocation that brought him fame and accolades but very nearly extinguished him. An artist who lived among businessmen, a man who loved men but hated homosexuality, a loving father who found it difficult to discharge the duties of fatherhood, a short-story sprinter who struggled over the long distances required of the novelist, Cheever took out a mortgage on a life he could never repay.

The author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003), Bailey has become something of a specialist in the lives of alcoholic practitioners of suburban realism, and it's only fitting he has moved on to one of the founding fathers of the genre (the other being a fellow New Yorker contributor, the much-denigrated John O'Hara). Cheever, however, is a greater writer than Yates and a more complex case. Bailey had access to every bit of Cheeveriana he could locate, including the vastness of the complete journals (only a selection was published in 1991), which run to forty-three hundred pages. The Journals are a masterwork unto themselves and provide a road map to the author's origins.

Cheever's ambivalence about his New England Protestant roots tugged at him. He liked to remind his children they were "Cheevahs," but he wasn't ever quite sure whether he came from the ruling class or a routed class, and joked he was descended from the "wrong Cheevers." Growing up on Massachusetts's South Shore, the young Cheever watched his father, a traveling shoe salesman who'd lost most of his money in the ’20s, go from a "jaunty golf-playing burgher to a sodden failure with a hacking cough who always seemed to be sitting on the porch with nothing to do," Bailey writes. Cheever was even more ashamed when his proud and stubborn mother opened a gift shop in Quincy. Years later, he wrote of his family that they were "sexual losers, sartorial losers, bums at the bank. Unclean outcasts whose destiny, written in the stars, was to empty garbage pails and pump the shit out of septic tanks but who, through some cultural miscalculation, imagined themselves being carried off the Lacrosse field on the shoulders of their teammates and then dancing with the prettiest girl in the world."

Cheever wouldn't end up pumping septic tanks, but the jobbing life of a writer would provide no quick escape from this fate. He left the private Thayer Academy—it isn't certain whether he was expelled or departed on his own initiative—and, like many writers of the time, ended up in New York in the orbit of the New Republic, where at eighteen he published his first story. A certified bohemian, Cheever circulated in Greenwich Village and got by on a meager income. The New Republic's literary editor, Malcolm Cowley, brought Cheever along; to his first mentor, he would later write, "You taught me to ... by-pass the French symbolists, train a retriever with a fresh egg, buy my shoes at Fortnum & Mason, catch a trout and keep my literary sights high and earnest." Vital lessons for an aspiring member of the gentry, but in the late ’30s, two other editors-about-town, the New Yorker's Katharine White and William Maxwell, transformed Cheever into a star.

Cheever's tenure at the New Yorker, which would publish his most famous stories, was the central literary relationship in his career. From the ’30s into the ’60s, the magazine nurtured and enraged him by turns; the fees it paid helped him to buy a house in Ossining (this despite the objections of the magazine's lawyer, who told Maxwell that "freelance writers should not own property"), but it also rejected scores of stories that were then published elsewhere, which did little to appease Cheever's feeling that he was always being crowded out by some other New Yorker writer, whether J. D. Salinger (the "Godamned sixth-rate Salinger"), John Updike, or Donald Barthelme ("The stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me.... Blooey. It's like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago").

With one eye on Cheever's bank account and the other on his prose, Bailey diligently tracks the author's editorial and monetary dealings with the magazine. In many ways, Cheever fit right into the publication's middlebrow cosmopolitanism. He did as much to create the mature New Yorker style as the magazine did to burnish his reputation as a master of the short-story form. An improviser who wrote at speed when so moved—there were long, paralyzing bouts of inactivity—he turned around work quickly. He was gratified to be writing for "estimable men and woman," and by the mid-’40s, he was on way to becoming an estimable man himself—outwardly, at least. Cheever never let a lack of funds deter him from his status ambitions; he said good-bye to bohemia and moved with his wife, Mary, and daughter, Susan, to a Sutton Place apartment well beyond their means. There, Cheever began to play a kind of double game. "Almost every morning for the next five years," Bailey writes, "he'd put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he'd doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch."

Cheever needed such rituals, but he was acutely aware what he was up to. Fussing over the monogram on a towel one evening in 1948, he mused in his journal about "this concern for outward order.... I was born into no true class, and it was my decision early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously." He became a special kind of provincial writer, working the narrow terrain that stretched from Manhattan's East Side to the small hamlets along the Hudson River. Here, the money was oldish but not grand. The people were comfortable but not posh. His characters had to get out of bed in the morning—they were always running to catch the morning train. They sent their kids to private school, summered on the Cape, and drank way too much, closing out the evening session, which generally began around seven—if it hadn't already at noon—to the clink of glasses of gin.

Whatever Cheever's doubts about his place in tony circles, his outsider-as-insider status paid dividends. He wrote about the shabbily genteel milieu with a mixture of pathos, bitterness, nostalgia, and regret. The odd charm of the stories derives from how he mixes these tones. (Not always successfully—he had a smothering way with irony.) He could be wonderfully biting, as when, in "Just One More Time," he describes "the shoestring aristocrats of the upper East Side—the elegant, charming, and shabby men who work for brokerage houses, and their high-flown wives, with their thrift-shop minks and their ash-can fur pieces, their alligator shoes and their snotty ways with doormen and with the cashiers in supermarkets."

Much like Cheever himself, these people were precariously perched, in need of money and clutching after some last bit of respectability. "We both come from that enormous stratum of the middle class that is distinguished by its ability to recall better times," says the narrator of another story, talking about himself and his wife. "Lost money is so much a part of our lives that I am sometimes reminded of expatriates, of a group who have adapted themselves energetically to some alien soil but who are reminded, now and then, of the escarpments of their native coast." Don't be distracted by the brightness and energy, and listen for the morbid notes always breaking through the fizz of cocktail-party chatter: "She had known a man like that. He had worked day and night making money. He ruined his partners and betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children, and then, after making millions and millions of dollars, he went down to his office one Sunday afternoon and jumped out of the window."

Cheever held a cracked mirror up to the New Yorker's affluent readership. But his sociology was delivered in a playful, lilting, almost musical prose: The beginning of "O Youth and Beauty!" (that exclamation point might as well be a dagger)—"At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill"—is almost hummable. Even if some critics found the tone irritating—Irving Howe dismissed him as "a toothless Thurber"—he wasn't a brassy show-off in the manner of Nabokov. There was a politesse to his writing that was appropriate to the venue and, all the better, allowed him to conceal his tricks and gibes.

Cheever didn't think much of his short stories; he wrote them to bring in money, though he suspected Maxwell was underpaying him. His relationship with his editor would come under strain after he decamped from Manhattan in the early ’50s to the town of Scarborough in Westchester County, where he spent the decade and more observing organization men and their stay-at-home wives. (Interesting fact: Cheever lived in the house once occupied by Yates, which was near a real Revolutionary Road.) Maxwell would steer into print Cheever's best fictional riffs on his suburban surroundings, among them "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Five-Forty-Eight," but Cheever wondered whether he wasn't floundering, only this time in a more pastoral setting. "Every time I read a review of Saul Bellow I get the heaves. Oh this big, wild, rowdy country, full of whores and prizefighters, and here I am stuck with an old river in the twilight and the deterioration of the middle-aged businessman," he lamented in his journal circa 1953. (Cheever actually admired Bellow a great deal, and the two struck up an unlikely friendship.)

At the time, Cheever was in the midst of a decade-long struggle to complete his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, which had plunged him back into his New England past and is now collected along with Cheever's four other novels in a spiffy Library of America edition, as the short stories are in another. A rambling, picaresque catalog of eccentrics and ham-handed antics, the novel obsessed Cheever as a way of transforming and exorcising his past. Although often strained and artificial sounding, this first effort to break out of the restrictions of his natural form won him a National Book Award in 1958. (For my money, along with the extraordinary Falconer, the critically drubbed Bullet Park [1969], when he went weird and wrote a ’60s novel without really meaning to, showcases the best of Cheever in long form.) Whatever doubts he had about his short fiction, he kept tinkering with the genre he helped perfect—see the 1960 story "Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel" for some spoofing postmodern high jinks, years before such stuff went mainstream—despite the growing exasperation of Maxwell.

Cheever was not happy when "The Swimmer," today his best-known story, appeared behind an Updike piece in 1964. ("This seems to me unintelligent and perhaps mean, but then one encounters much of both," he sneered.) Of the Gide-influenced exercise "The Jewels of the Cabots," Maxwell reportedly commented, "As God is my witness, this is not a story." By the end of the decade, the fed-up Cheever began shopping his work to Playboy. "They pay well and they are hospitable," he wrote a friend, "and the tits aren't any more distracting than the girdle advertisements in the New Yorker." Cheever, when he had to be, was all business.

The work Bailey put into this huge biography is laudable, but the latter stages of his book are troubling. By its very nature, biography is a voyeuristic form, but Bailey takes the prying to a harrowingly explicit level. (The index even provides an entry for "Cheever, naked in less-than-private situations.") "He and Mary still tried from time to time [to have sex], but it was no use: at best he could get started a bit, but rarely (if ever) finish," Bailey writes in a typical bit of close-up detail. No humiliation can pass the eagle eye of this author.

Certainly, Cheever conspired in his own diagnosis, keeping a careful record of ejaculations, sexual fantasies, liaisons, boozing, and bickering. He was as conscientious in documenting his inner life as he was in playing up his wasp bona fides. As a public figure, Cheever had arrived. "I am a Wasp, my God, look," a journalist quoted him as saying. Time magazine, which put him on its cover in 1964, drooled, "[Cheever] wears Brooks Brothers shirts with their conspicuously missing pockets and would never consider having a mongrel dog." But it was the ever-sharp Maxwell who perceptively summed it up: "Cheever was not, I think, content merely to be an artist. He wanted a place in society, to lead the life of upper-middle-class people as he saw it (with some idealization, I think). He would have liked to have had lots of money, entertained beautifully, been socially the best there was." Don Draper, you have nothing on John Cheever.

A spirited talker and compulsive, playful storyteller, Cheever tended to the theatrical, but this performance brought uncertain rewards. "Gin seems to be the only way out," he noted—he eventually needed bucket loads to get through the day. He told his doctor of his "anxious and greedy urge to take more than my share of brute pleasure." If he was frequently impotent with his wife, the frisky Cheever took pleasure with other women (there was an affair with a young student and a romp with the actress Hope Lange), his hand (often), and other men (at least a dozen over his life). He tried to contain his homosexual inclinations, but doing so only brought him more emotional derangement. He thrilled to the male body but was terrified of what would it do to him. Homosexuals, he worried, seemed "unserious, humorless and revolting." In one of the most haunting passages of the Journals, Cheever wrote, "If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol."

For Bailey, Cheever's dealings with other men always carried latent sexual charge. This is true, up to a point. In the tensions between Maxwell, himself conflicted in his sexuality, and Cheever, Bailey locates a tacit understanding between the two about their unspoken longings. Yet Bailey can push this line of inquiry too far. Of Cheever's praise for The Adventures of Augie March, Bailey writes, "He might have been less generous if he hadn't been so smitten with the man; yet I see this as Cheever merely linking up with a kinsman in the literary trade. Bailey daringly speculates that the young Cheever might have slept with his brother, Fred, a fellow alcoholic and ne'er-do-well. The brothers had an intensely complicated relationship—Cheever told a psychiatrist that it was "the most significant relationship in [his] life.... It was like a love affair." "Whether it was an actual love affair is hard to say," the probing biographer adds, "though it appears not to have been entirely platonic." Even if Cheever hinted at something more with Fred, there is much ambiguity here.

It's a wonder that Cheever, like that millionaire who "betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children," didn't jump out a window himself. He opted instead for the slow-motion immolation of drinking. The last sections of Cheever: A Life come close to being unbearable. His resentments toward Mary amplified, and his behavior toward his children erupted into viciousness. He harped on Susan's weight; he told his middle child, Ben, "You're pathetic," when he wasn't telling him, "You laugh like a woman." Bailey interviewed the Cheever children extensively—Susan and Ben, both now established authors in their own right, and the youngest son, Fred—and their testimony is frequently heartbreaking. "Cheever loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown," Bailey observes. Yet even when he wasn't grappling with the difficulties of child rearing, Cheever found himself despondent all on his own. "My bowels are open, my balls are ticklish, my work moves, my children are well and unprecedentedly happy, I love my wife, my house is warm, so why should I wake in throes of melancholy," he wrote in early 1967.

He would never find a satisfactory answer to that question, even if his last years brought a measure of peace. By the early ’70s, Cheever, a shambling, sodden wreck, all but ceased to function. A teaching stint at Boston University was a near disaster—he lived in a grubby flat, neglected his teaching duties, and took to drinking fortified wine with bums on park benches. When a cop harassed him, the writer, his hauteur bristling, told him, "My name is John Cheever." But in this wretched phase—Updike found his idol naked one evening outside the older man's apartment—Cheever began gathering himself for Falconer. Spirited to Manhattan's Smither's Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center by Fred, Cheever was pummeled into sobriety. His fellow patients didn't buy his superior act, and the staff psychologist compared him to Uriah Heep: "He is a classic denier who moves in and out of focus. He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalized many rather imperious upper class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same time."

Given the edifice Cheever constructed for himself over the decades, the writing of Falconer was a brave act. Some of the details he drew from his time as a creative-writing teacher in Sing Sing, but into the character of Ezekiel Farragut, Cheever put his most personal feelings about his desires and afflictions. "I like to think of Falconer as the sum of everything I've ever known and smelled and tasted," he told Newsweek. Many of his decorous New Yorker readers must have been shocked to find their John Cheever writing the following scene, a tableau of men masturbating in a bathroom, where Farragut has gone to watch and participate: "There were the frenzied and compulsive pumpers, the long-timers who caressed themselves for half an hour, there were the groaners and the ones who sighed, and most of the men, when their trigger was pulled and the fusillade began, would shake, buck, catch their breath and make weeping sounds, sounds of grief, of joy, and sometimes death rattles." But Cheever could finally say to himself, as Farragut does in the novel's closing line, rejoice, rejoice.