Reddit reviews Europe: A History

I'm always a bit wary of answering questions like this on AH, but you could do worse than Norman Davies' Europe: A History. It's 20 years old now but covers a lot of stuff in one book, and as Davies is a Poland specialist, it includes stuff on Eastern Europe that a lot of Anglo historians don't. Huge survey histories like this always have their flaws; there are differing interpretations of many points that can't be included; historians may use the lack of space to forefront their own theories on something when they are actually not widely accepted; and no-one is a deep specialist in everything over 1000+ years. Perfect one-volume histories of entire continents from the year dot do not exist: they're really a starting point, and are best read in conjunction with published reviews by other historians, which should point out the most significant errors.

>I'm not looking to read several 1,000-page tomes.

/u/minustwofish: "Fuck you. Here are several 1000 page tomes."

...how about instead you pick up Europe by Norman Davies, which is as the title might imply, a history of Europe. Things I like about it:

• Achieving an artful balance between the depth of purely academic
  texts and the readability of a book intended to be read by people who don't already know a lot about the subject.
  
• For the most part, is a straightforward expedition through all the major events of European history, but also has several dozen "capsules", which are digressions of one or two pages each, into topics and incidents that are quirky, notable and generally interesting enough to do a dive into - which the otherwise strictly chronological structure would make difficult to cover.
  
• Anglo-centrism. Many history books written in English tend to give undue weight to the impact of English-speaking peoples on the events of a particular place or period (and in particular tend to treat Britain in Europe as having exceptional and therefore exceptionally noteworthy characteristics). This has resulted in the past, in works that purport to be histories of Europe where Poles and Slavs for example, almost do not feature at all despite comprising a giant proportion of the population of the continent. "Europe" avoids this by treating Europe holistically. Readers can expect to learn about all of Europe, not just the parts that were relevant to events occurring in Britain.
  
  Chapter eight covers the period 1650-1789 - which anyone looking to get a primer on the background of Quicksilver will find very relevant.