Borderlines: 21 Lines on the Map that Divide and Define Europe
(Paperback)
Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 11th June 2024
Hardback
Published: 10th September 2024
Paperback
Published: 8th July 2025
Publishing Details
Borderlines: 21 Lines on the Map that Divide and Define Europe
By (Author) Lewis Baston
Hodder & Stoughton
Hodder & Stoughton
11th June 2024
United Kingdom
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
European history
320.12094
Physical Properties
Paperback
336
Width 152mm, Height 232mm, Spine 28mm
410g
Description
An illuminating history of twenty-one key borderlines that demarcate Europe, and what they can tell us about the past, present and future of Europe.
'A stunningly topical and timely book. Lewis Baston is a remarkable talent, very gifted as a writer and quite extraordinarily perceptive and original in his thinking' Anthony SeldonEurope's internal borders have rarely been 'natural'; they have more often been created by accident or force. Successive powers have redrawn the map of our continent, with varying degrees of success: the fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but the present shape of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945. In Borderlines, writer and political historian Lewis Baston journeys along and across key borders from west to east Europe, to explore their history. He explores how places and people heal from the scars, physical and psychological, left by a Europe of ethnic cleansing and barbed wire fences. And he searches for a better European future amid the ravages of Brexit, COVID and war - finding it in unexpected places, scattered from the back lanes of rural Ireland to the Viennese-style coffee houses of the elegant Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. A work of contemporary history that will appeal to readers of Tim Marshall but also Cal Flyn, Borderlines is a wry but ultimately optimistic look at Europe from its edges, the places where the questions and contradictions are sharpest - the cracks where the light gets in.Author Bio
Lewis Baston has written on British politics and the electoral landscape for nearly thirty years, from polling analysis for the Financial Times to election results analysis for the Guardian. From 2003 to 2010 he was Research Director for the Electoral Reform Society, and from 2011 to 2015 he was Research Fellow at Democratic Audit. He has appeared on BBC Breakfast, The One Show and Sunday Politics, and Radio 4's PM and The World Tonight. He also recently appeared as a 'border expert' on Tim Marshall's series about borderlands for The Compass.
