Mary Fulbrook's Introduction to this splendid concluding volume in The Short Oxford History of Europe begins with a vivid contrast, setting the struggle for survival in a devastated rubble-strewn street of East Berlin in 1945 against the same location in the reunited city at the end of the century, unrecognizable in its gleaming, confident, cosmopolitan affluence. The book brings home the extraordinary waves of transformation that have washed across...