Prisoners of Time: Prussians Germans and Other Humans, by Christopher Clark

cares for Borges after he falls off the side of a mountain near Aviemore while impersonating King Lear for a storm that has called to him. As do the father and daughter who fish him out of Loch Ness after he capsizes a rowing boat while reciting the Song of Creation from Beowulf.

In his afterword, Parini admits to having dined out on his Borges tales for almost half a century. He retells them here with a nice light touch. They make the perfect comic pair, these two: ‘the callow, overly serious, shy, and often terrified’ Jay, and the blind bard who takes time between pratfalls and literary disquisitions to ponder madly on his young guide’s dreams and terrors.

But for all his talk of labyrinths, mirrors and fictitious selves, Borges is striving desperately to give the boy courage. By the time Rocinante stalls just outside the city limits of St Andrews, he has somehow succeeded, ‘forcing a shift’ in Jay, ‘a change in perspective’ that must, he later decides, ‘have hit me at just the right time’.

Parini went on to become one of the most admired and American original writers of his generation. This is his tribute to the man who opened the door. Germans in the dock

HAMISH ROBINSON Prisoners of Time: Prussians, Germans and Other Humans By Christopher Clark Allen Lane £25

Prisoners of Time shares common ground with the two superb books that brought Christopher Clark to prominence.

Iron Kingdom was a comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Prussia. The Sleepwalkers was his brilliant unravelling of the diplomatic entanglements that led to the First World War.

It also hints, with mild provocation, at a philosophical stance: the historian will view all things, even Prussians and Germans, humanely.

This humanity is evident in the two detailed historical papers included in the collection. There’s a study of the ambivalent career of Colonel General Blaskowitz, a senior Wehrmacht officer who threw himself down a stairwell on the eve of a likely acquittal at the Nuremburg Trials in 1948. And there’s ‘From Prussia with Love’ – an account of a sex scandal involving the prosecution of two charismatic preachers in Königsberg in the 1830s.

In the former, Clark teases out the Christian ethos of a professional soldier.

Calendar of a Book of Hours, August. From Going to Church in Medieval England by Nicholas Orme, Yale University Press, £20

In 1939, he blighted his career by repeatedly filing reports complaining of atrocities in Poland, but continued doggedly to serve the regime in subordinate capacities throughout the war.

In the latter, he highlights the real consolation provided by eccentric religious groups persecuted by an ‘enlightened’ administration.

The same capacity for empathy is on show in his assessment of John Röhl’s three-volume biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Röhl, he argues, like many biographers, came to despise his subject, and his contempt unbalances an otherwise unrivalled scholarly achievement.

It is only in not seeing the Kaiser as the hateful caricature of bombast and bluster that one can come to a more balanced view of his role in the diplomatic escalation leading up to the First World War. There was a cautious, even cowardly Kaiser, whom readers of The Sleepwalkers will recognise, who was not all hothead and fool.

In a more speculative essay advertised as the centrepiece of the book, ‘The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar’, Clark sketches the shifting, cyclical morphing of power through history as it concentrates or disperses, often deceptively, in different types of regime.

There is a pair of Festschrift-style tributes to two pioneers of world history, Jürgen Osterhammel and Chris Bayley. Clark praises the former for the bird-like freedom with which he surveys his vast historical panoramas, swooping down on instructive detail. He praises the latter for the untrammelled curiosity and