J ONATHAN S UMPTION Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ That Sweet Enemy (Heinemann,
£25) is history with the grand sweep, an elegant and perceptive account of Anglo-French relations over the three centuries since Louis XIV, ranging from food to literature to politics. On a more intimate scale, Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (Yale, £25) is a minor masterpiece of social history by a writer who combines his scholarship with an appealing style and a moving empathy with the people whose lives he describes. In a very different vein, Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines (Weidenfeld, £20), collects some of the early letters of a talented historian and a master of the English language who squandered his energies in pursuing relentless vendettas against all around him: a book that fascinates and horrifies at the same time.
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