Blame the gerbils
Tom Shippey: After the Plague, 7 November 2024
The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe
by James Belich.
Princeton, 622 pp., £20, August,978 0 691 21916 5 Show More
by James Belich.
Princeton, 622 pp., £20, August,
“... with Frankopan’s) is that they may contain a warning for our own time. Yet as James Belich writes, ‘historians are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that natural forces in some way circumscribe human agency.’ In The World the Plague Made he has a hard case to make, and a somewhat heartless one: that the Black Death – perhaps ... ”