Source Notes

Wherever possible, I give a link to a freely available online source. Book titles are given in full at first mention, thereafter in short title form. Numbers in brackets at the beginning of each line are page numbers for the UK edition published by Bodley Head in 2026. See also Further Reading.

Chapter 1. Lunchtime Europe

(1) Budweiser… See https://www.budejovickybudvar.cz/en/brewery/history and https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/world/europe/germany-budweiser-beer.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

(2) 'A country within the EU'… https://europeanmoments.com/changing-world/ecfr-joint-report-jan2025-alone-in-a-trumpian-world

(3) One out of every four children… See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Children_at_risk_of_poverty_or_social_exclusion

(4) The happiest days in Russian history… I owe this joke to Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilisation: A History of Europe in Our Time, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, ix

(5) According to an online gazeteer… These figures have been assembled from https://geotargit.com, a geographic name server which lists all places sharing a name worldwide.

(5) 2.8 billion people around the world... https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/population/country-comparison/   Population figures are from 2021, the last complete cross-section available.

(7) 'Everything is too small. The cars are too small.'…         P J O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell, Picador, London, 2002, 211-31, this on 212

(8) Are you enjoying your stay at the luxurious Hôtel Lutetia…   see Jane Rogoyska, Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War, Allen Lane, London, 2026. There also the photos.

(8) One on my bookshelf has 2396 pages…  Christophe Charle & ors, eds, L’Europe: Encyclopédie Historique, Actes Sud, Arles, 2018

Chapter 2. Geographical Europe

(11) Scientifically calculated… this was calculated by France's Institute of National Geography (IGN) in 1989 by a method explained, for those who can understand it, in this formidable article by Jean-Francois Hangouët, ‘How IGN (France) computed the so-called “centre of gravity” of physical Europe in 1989 and 2004’, arXiv e-prints, October 2019, 10.48550/arXiv.1910.04252. The IGN recalculated it in 2004 according to a slightly adjusted method and came up with a marginally different location.

(12) A Polish filmmaker called Stanisław Mucha found around forty claimants…  quoted in Martin Wolf, ‘Es werde Mitte’, Der Spiegel, 23 May 2004

(12) a hilarious documentary… https://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/4398/the-center

(13) 'not geographically part of Europe'…   See Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Vintage, London, 2024, 37, and the relevant source notes for that book.

(13) His adviser Vasily Tatishchev suggested…  see Mark Bassin, ‘Russia between Europe and Asia: the Ideological Construction of Geographical Space’, Slavic Review, 50, 1 (spring 1991), 1-17

(13) An Historico-Geographical Description of the North and Eastern Parts of Europe and Asia …         A facsimile of the 1738 English edition was published in 2024 by Serpent Books, Uppsala, with a preface by Nikolas Århem.

(14) In 1998, 71% of Russian respondents to a survey said… Figures on Russia from the Levada Center, see https://www.levada.ru/2015/12/02/rossiyane-razlyubili-evropu/. Figures on Ukraine from unpublished polling data collected in November 2024 in 24 countries for the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Europe in a Changing World research project of the Dahrendorf Programme at the European Studies Centre, University of Oxford. For details of the polling, see the methodology annex to Timothy Garton Ash, Ivan Krastev, Mark Leonard, ‘Alone in a Trumpian World: The EU and Global Public Opinion After the US Elections’, https://ecfr.eu/publication/alone-in-a-trumpian-world-the-eu-and-global-public-opinion-after-the-us-elections/.

(16) Europeans have the highest lactose tolerance in the world… Tim Flannery, Europe: The First 100 Million Years, Penguin, London, 2018, 236 – there also the detail about the Irish.

(17) the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe has reconstructed… See Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, Allen Lane, London, 2001

(18) the Vikings were making incredible water voyages… see Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm, Penguin, London, 2020, and map in Barry Cunliffe, Europe between the Oceans: Themes and Variations, 9000 BC – A.D. 1000, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011, 469

(18) Harald Hardrada… On this, listen to the delightful episode 552 of the The Rest Is History podcast with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook

(19) Zheng He… On this, see Edward Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433, Pearson Longman, New York, 2006, and for some intriguing background, Yiu Sou, ‘The Cessation of Zheng He's Voyages and the Beginning of Private Sailings: Fiscal Competition between Emperors and Bureaucrats’, Journal of Chinese History (2024), 8, 95-114

(20) ‘highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas…’ Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, Vintage, London, 2005, 414

(20) historians would be offering multiple explanations for the Rise of the East… for this interesting thought experiment, see Ayşe Zarakol, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of the Eastern World Orders, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2022, 1-4. Ian Morris does something similar at the beginning of his Why the West Still Rules – For Now, Profile, London, 2010. The coinage 'Zhengguo' is my own, with linguistic advice from Alec Ash.

(21) …the slave labour of well over 10 million people… figures for the period 1501 to 1866 at slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. The difference between the figures for ‘embarked’ and ‘disembarked’ is 1.82 million, indicating that they must have died on the way.

(21) that prosaic but exceptionally nourishing tuber… See John Reader, The Untold History of the Potato, Vintage, London, 2009. According to a careful estimate made by two economic historians, more than a quarter of population growth and urbanisation between 1700 and 1900 can reasonably be ascribed to the introduction of the potato. See Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, ‘The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanisation: Evidence from a Historical Experiment’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2011, Nr 126, 593-650

(21) It was one of the main reasons for the spectacular growth in the population of Ireland… Reader, Untold History, 130

(22) they map quite closely onto the distribution of coalfields… See Michael Andrews, The Birth of Europe: Colliding Continents and the Destiny of Nations, BCA, London, 1991, 204

(22) The words are adapted from Julius Caesar's On the Gallic Wars… For the quotation from Caesar, see Cunliffe, Europe between the Oceans, 10

(23) ‘the Englishman of 1750 was closer…’ David S Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe From 1750 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, 5

(23) ‘after the last European muskox died in what is now Sweden…’ Flannery, Europe, 251

(23) ‘from the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces…’ This quotation comes in chapter 44 of Hardy's The Woodlanders, first published in 1887 but looking back to his rural childhood in the 1840s.

(23) urbanisation only passed the 50% mark for the continent as a whole… https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/long-term-urban-population-region?country=Eastern+Africa~Western+Europe~Korea~Central+Europe~Europe+%28excl.+Russia%29.

(24) ‘all he could see was distant furnaces and coke-ovens…’ This quotation comes in the first chapter of Germinal, first published in 1885. I have slightly adapted the translation by Leonard Tancock in the Penguin Classics edition.

(24) It grew to some 265 million in 1850,… Estimates from Carlo M Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population, Penguin, London, 1974, 115. More recent research has revised the estimated emigration figure to upwards of 60 million.

(25) a repurposed complex of former coal mines is even a World Heritage Site… this is the Zollverein mining complex in Essen, see https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/975/

(25) Eighty per cent of the burning of carbon-based fuels has happened since 1945… see Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Bloomsbury, London, 2024, 625

(25) … nearly one third of all global carbon emissions since 1750… to be precise, 29.9% for 1750-2024 according to https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260710-182139/co2-emissions.html

(26) called Prisoners of Geography… Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know about Global Politics, Elliott & Thompson, London, 2015

Chapter 3. Historical Europe

3.1 Rome

(29) ‘in Rome, the peoples of Europe found a common fascination’… Julia M H Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, 292

(29) ‘uphold inviolably everything that previous Roman emperors …’ Smith, Europe after Rome, 258

(30) In a bracing book called Escape from Rome … Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2019

3.2 Christianity

(31) How on earth did what began as a cult movement… see Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, London, Allen Lane, 2009, esp 1-3, 19

(31) ‘The Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire…’ This comes in the magnificent chapter 47 of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

(33) ‘Without Mohammed, no Charlemagne’… This summarises the famous ‘Pirenne thesis’. See the discussion by John Tolan in Étienne François and Thomas Serrier, The European Way since Homer: History, Memory, Identity, Vol. 1, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2021, 291ff

(33) ‘for now only Europe is Christian’… quoted in a superbly learned little book by Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1957, 80. To be precise, this comes in a draft of an English memorandum for the Council — hence my wording ‘prepared for’.

(34) ‘Christians, see Europeans’… Hay, Europe, 109

(35) ‘Jerusalem, Athens and Rome’… This formula seems to have been popularised by Denis de Rougemont, attributing the original insight to Paul Valéry.

(35) ‘an extraordinary diversity called Christianity’ MacCulloch, History of Christianity, 1015

(35) Those excommunications were not formally rescinded until 1965 – see François and Serrier, European Way since Homer, Vol. 2, 204-215

(36) protected Luther not because he liked his radical theology… see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700, Penguin, London, 2004, 116ff

(36) a ‘Protestatio’… see MacCulloch, Reformation, xx

(36) ‘I assure you that no kingdom has ever…’ This comes in Letter 27 of Montesquieu's Persian Letters

3.3 Enlightenment

(37) ‘… the Barbarians and Christians’… This comes in the concluding chapter 71 of Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

(37) ‘The Church of Rome…’ in Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chapter 16

(37) ’Écrasez l'infâme!' Voltaire uses this phrase often throughout his correspondence, for example in letters to D’Alembert, 23 March 1760 and Condorcet, 17 June 1760

(37) ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek…’ Paul, Letter to the Galatians, 3.28

(38) … the very idea of the individual… see Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 2014

(38) Dated by one leading historian… David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, Penguin, London, 2016, 571

(39) ‘God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.’ Alexander Pope, ‘Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’ (1730)

(39) ‘Newton of the moral sciences’ quoted in Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2001, 15

(40) ‘the Republic of Letters’ see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, 21. Interesting on the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is Lorraine Daston, ‘The ideal and reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment’, Science in Context, 4, 2 (1991), 367-86

(40) ‘Did Europe exist before 1700?’ Peter Burke, ‘Did Europe exist before 1700?’, History of European Ideas, 1, 1 (1980), 21-29

(40) ‘It would not be an exaggeration…’ Tzvetab Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment, Atlantic Books, London, 2009, 147

(40) Immanuel Kant's 1784 answer… The exact edition is Immanuel Kant et al., Was ist Aufklärung? Erhard Bahr ed, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1974. I have of course summarised and paraphrased his argument.

3.4 Empires

(42) The frontiers of pre-1914 empires re-emerge... See the Economist, 21 November 2018, and the graphic at https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/11/21/imperial-borders-still-shape-politics-in-poland-and-romania

(43) ‘Your map of Africa is very good,’… See the chapter by Ulf Morgenstern in Holger Afflerbach & ors, eds, Die Berliner Afrika-Konferenz 1884/85, Brill Schöningh, Paderborn, 2025, 111-122, quotation from Wolf's diaries, published in 1904, on 112-113. Of course Wolf may have polished the quotation a bit in his diaries, or when he prepared them for publication, but the sense is very much Bismarck’s.

(45) the original French-language guide to the Universal Exhibition… Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles 1958: Guide Officiel, Desclé & Cie, Tournai, 1958, 177-191

(46) ‘if this weren't France, you would be 10,000 times more dans la merde [in the shit]’... quoted in https://www.liberation.fr/politique/si-cetait-pas-la-france-vous-seriez-10-000-fois-plus-dans-la-merde-les-propos-de-macron-a-mayotte-ne-passent-pas-20241220_TFRN3C54CJA6VE36Q7BO6MG7II/

(46) Here you find many Congolese, and those of African descent whom the Belgian-Congolese vocalist Marie Daulne has dubbed Afroeuropeans… See Johny Pitts, Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, Penguin, London, 2020, 85-101

3.5 Countries

(47) ’a natural grouping of human beings’.… In conversation with Ezra Klein on his New York Times podcast, 1 August 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-yoram-hazony.html

(48) For forty of the seventy-two years between 1743 and 1815… Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992, 1. My calculations, looking at the exact start and end dates of the wars in the years she gives.

(49) ’a language is a dialect with an army and navy’… Often quoted by the linguist Max Weinreich, and sometimes (probably wrongly) attributed to him.

(49) In 1863, an official survey found that… Quoted in Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernisation of Rural France 1870-1914, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1976, 67

(50) Thus, for example, a 1918 British War Office map… Reproduced in Michael Swift, Historical Maps of Europe, Public Records Office, London, 2000, 68

(50) …the map produced by Count Pál Teleki… Reproduced in James Cheshire, The Library of Lost Maps, Bloomsbury, London, 2025, 194

(52) He replied ‘Je suis Marseillais’.… see Timothy Garton Ash, Edward Mortimer and Kerem Öktem, Freedom and Diversity, Dahrendorf Programme, Oxford, 2013, 53

(54) Hamburg’s 1497 municipal code is illuminated… see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Times Illustrated History of Europe, Times Books, London, 1995, 83

(54) ‘Hell upon Earth’ is how the communist activist Friedrich Engels described Manchester… quoted in François and Serrier, European Way since Homer, Vol. 2, 102

(55) ‘her pose and the diaphanous simplicity of her robe…’ John White, Art and Architecture in Italy 1250-1400, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993, 391

(56) By 1500 there were some 65 European universities…, see the entry on universities in Christophe Charle & ors, L’Europe: Encyclopédie Historique, 872-77. (This is the volume with a modest 2396 pages.)

3.7 Wars

(58) A database prepared by the political scientist Peter Brecke… see https://brecke.inta.gatech.edu/research/conflict/. In this instance, I follow his regional classification to find the figures for Europe.

(58) which Winston Churchill described as ‘a second Thirty Years War’… see the facsimile of the original transcript of the Congress of Europe, The Hague, 7-11 May 1948, republished by The Council of Europe in 1999, this on page 10

(59) ‘it’s something that young men do’… Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Penguin Books, New York, 2011, 519

(59) ‘the dead pierced by the wood of the lances…’ Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Translated by Edmund Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the author, Revised Edition, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, 162

(59) 'The pleasure in killing and torturing others was great…' Elias, The Civilising Process, 163

(60) ‘Stand in the trench, Achilles,/Flame-capped, and shout for me,’… Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘I Saw a Man This Morning’. The best account of the origins and meaning of this poem is given by Elizabeth Vandiver in her Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, 263-77. Shaw-Stewart died in combat in France in December 1917.

(60) ‘That old Lie, Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori…’ Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. The Latin line comes from an ode by Horace.

(60) ‘¡ Viva la muerte!’… Quoted in François and Serrier, European Way since Homer, Vol. 1, 35

(60) ‘the invention of peace’… See Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace: Reflections on War and International Order, Profile Books, London, 2000, a wise short book which has as its epigraph a quotation from Sir Henry Maine: ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.’

(61) The criteria early Christian theologians developed for ‘Just War’… In this summary I follow Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, 3

(61) ‘War made the state, and the state made war’.… Quoted, with sources, in Ian Morris's stimulating and provocative War - What Is It Good for? The Role of Conflict in Civilisation from Primates to Robots, Profile Books, London, 2015, 18. Morris goes on to make the point about states also making peace which I have reformulated in my own words.

(63) ‘perpetual peace lasts until the next war’ … This comes in the Acknowledgements at the very end of Stella Ghervas, Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 2021, 475

3.8 Revolutions

(64) ‘We had 1689, our silent quiet revolution…’ Quoted from the official transcript on the Thatcher Foundation website of her interview with Le Monde, conducted on 11 July 1989 and published on 13 July, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107500

(66) ‘had the feeling that we had staged a play…’ Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, Translated by George Lawrence, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1995, 53. I was pointed towards this quotation by Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World, 1848-1849, Penguin, London, 2023

(66) ‘replay the revolutions of yesteryear, 1789, 1848,… Bernard Guetta, Dans l'Ivresse de l'Histoire, J'Ai Lu/Flammarion, Paris, 2017, 53-59

(66) a woman dressed as Marianne see the photo in Clark, Revolutionary Spring, 753

(66) ‘the motor of the revolution’… Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Penguin, London, 2004, 725

(67) ‘hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place…)’ Quoted in Robert Service, Lenin: a Biography, Macmillan, London, 2000, 365.

(67) ‘explained with glee how he had incited…’ Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, Allen and Unwin, London, 1950, 219

(67) ‘an act of violence whereby one class overthrows another’… Quoted in George Lawson, Negotiated Revolutions: the Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile Routledge, Abingdon, 2005, 51

(67) ‘Taught by history,’… ‘Letter from the Gdańsk Prison’ (1985), in Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, translated by Maya Latynski, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987, 86

(69) ‘a post-revolutionary synthesis’… Clark, Revolutionary Spring, 747

(69) ‘Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in …’ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999, 167

(70) ‘All revolutions are failures,…’ George Orwell, ‘Arthur Koestler’, in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol.16, Secker and Warburg, London, 1998, 400

3.9 Migration

(70) …Europeans are 97–98 per cent descended from Africans… Johannes Krause & Thomas Trappe, A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are, W H Allen, London, 2021, 36

(71) … around one million people a year left Europe in the decade before the First World War… see Wasserstein, Barbarism and Civilisation, 16

(73) ‘owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted…’ See https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-relating-status-refugees

(74) Bulgaria, Lithuania and Latvia had lost more than one fifth of their population… see Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed, Allen Lane, London, 2019, 37. The ‘demographic anxiety’ is one of Krastev’s particular themes.

(74) the proportion of first-generation immigrants… for Sweden see https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population-and-living-conditions/population-composition-and-development/population-statistics/, for the UK https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/longterminternationalmigrationprovisional/yearendingjune2025 and for 1961   https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/immigrationpatternsofnonukbornpopulationsinenglandandwalesin2011/2013-12-17

(74) By 2024, one in every four people in Germany… see https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2025/05/PD25_181_125.html

(74) In big cities … see https://www.statistik-berlin-brandenburg.de/132-2025, https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/demographics/migrants/ and https://www.wien.gv.at/en/living-together/population-migration-fact-figures

(75) One out of every four Dubliners…. This was according to the 2022 census. Email from the Central Statistics Office, Dublin, 8 Jul 2026. For Ireland as an immigration country see https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-pme/populationandmigrationestimatesapril2025/keyfindings/

3.10 Individuals

(76) ‘history is the biography of great men’.… Quoted in E H Carr, What Is History?, Penguin, London, 1964, 49, citing Thomas Carlyle 'On Heroes and Hero Worship’

(76) Harold James points us to a remarkable graph… Harold James, Europe Reborn: A History, 1914-2000, Pearson Longman, Harlow, 2003, 28-29

(77) ‘six minutes in May’… see Nicholas Shakespeare, Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister, Vintage, London, 2017

(77) Stalin might have celebrated his final victory… This scenario is developed by Andrew Roberts in Robert Cowley ed, More What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, Pan Books, London, 2001, 281-290

(77) ‘I did think, maybe this is the last time,’… See Christopher Miller, The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine, Bloomsbury, London, 2023, 255-57, See also the account in Simon Shuster, The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shocked the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, William Collins, London, 2024

(77) ‘I need ammunition, not a ride’… see Miller, The War Came to Us, 270.

(77) ‘the president is here, we’re all here.…’ The original video with English subtitles can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/world/europe/zelensky-speech-video.html. I have adjusted the translation to reflect the original wording.

(79) ‘true antagonist, his moral anti-self’… see J P Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People, Fontana/Collins, London, 1975, 138-152, this on 138.

(79) ‘our country was behaving like Nazi Germany’… Quoted in Marc Bennets, ‘The teacher who fled Russia after refusing to tell pupils "Kremlin lies"’, The Times, 11 July 2025. This was presumably her retrospective account of what she said then, but the general spirit of it is clearly accurate.

Chapter 4. Cultural Europe

(83) ‘like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere’… W H Auden, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 2007, 854

(84) ‘it feels as though we’ve won the War at last’… Quoted in Simon Kuper, Football against the Enemy, Orion, London, 1996, 4

(85) its name derived from the verb restaurer … See the authoritative account in Rebecca L Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 2000

(85) ‘The destiny of nations…’ See Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, E. Dentu, Paris, 1883, 1-2

(85) ‘After the soup…’ this comes in chapter 2. This excellent English translation is by Joachim Neugroschel in the 2016 Penguin edition, 29

(88) ‘a book that has never finished saying…’ see Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?, Penguin, London, 2009, 3-9

(88) ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’… This famous definition comes in his book Culture and Anarchy

(89) ‘all the characteristic activities and interests of a people’… T S Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Faber and Faber, London, 1972, 31

(90) ‘I am a European, and I love Europe,’ said Turgenev… Orlando Figes, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture, Penguin, London, 2020, 239

(90) ‘everyone was reading everybody else’… Figes, The Europeans, 186

(92) Waterloo is something ’that everyone can relate to’... Quoted in Dean Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2026, 35

(93) ‘Greece is not part of Western civilisation…’ Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Free Press, London, 2002, 162

(94) ‘Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,’… Quoted in Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 26

(94) ‘The inhabitants of Asia are always considered inferior…’ Quoted in Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 105

(94) an 1822 map called Clark's Chart of the World… you can view a version held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford at https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/maps/2015/05

(94) ‘They say "Christ" and mean cotton’… This comes in Chapter 23 of Der Stechlin

(96) ‘If there were such a thing as a European collective spirit…’ Quoted in Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003, 255

(96) ‘Do not let us try to endow violence with the hypocritical name of civilisation,’… quoted in François and Serrier, European Way since Homer, Vol. 3, 135

(96) had a job interview with Monsieur Thys… This and other telling details from Zdzisław Najder's superbly comprehensive Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, this on 117

(96) ‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’… Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Penguin, London, 1973, this on 71, and the subsequent quotes on 71, 100, 23, 7

(97) 'To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric'… This line, sometimes misquoted as 'it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz', comes in his 1949 essay 'Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft'

(97) ‘into "the heart of darkness" of the twentieth century’… Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Lecture, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1981, 7

(97) Mark Mazower memorably applied… Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, Allen Lane, London, 1998

(97) George Steiner's In Bluebeard's Castle… George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-Definition of Culture, Faber and Faber, London, 1971

(99) You can find some of them online… see for example https://vishniac.icp.org/exhibition and https://www.ushmm.org/collections/the-museums-collections/collections-highlights/vishniac-collection. They are beautifully reproduced, with some explanatory commentary by Vishniac himself, in Roman Vishniac, A Vanished World, Allen Lane, London, 1983

(100) ‘today it is necessary to measure Europe by the yardstick of civilisation.’… Quoted from the record of a conference on ‘The European Spirit’ in Geneva in September 1946 by Shane Weller, The Idea of Europe: A Critical History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, 241

Chapter 5. Imagined Europe

(101) ‘adds a human touch…’ See https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/europa/html/index.en.html. There also the quotation from Mario Draghi.

(101) ‘unless, of course, we accept that it was named after the Europa who came from Tyre’… Herodotus, Histories, 4. 45 and 1. 2 (this translation by Tom Holland)

(102) ‘The rape of a Europe without borders’… See her essay 'Europe the nymph' in François and Serrier, European Way since Homer, Vol. 1, 233-235. There also the next quotation.

(103) ‘the idea of Europa’ … See https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2012/eu/lecture/

(103) ‘because God wants it, this sublime purpose’… Victor Hugo, Congrès de la Paix, Discours d'Ouverture, 21 August 1849, see https://www.herodote.net/Textes/victor-hugo-discours-du-congres-de-la-paix.pdf

(104) ‘God offers Africa to Europe. Take it!’… Victor Hugo, Discours sur L'Afrique, 18 May 1879 https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Depuis_l%E2%80%99Exil_Tome_VI_Discours_sur_l%E2%80%99Afrique

(104) ‘Germany feels; France thinks.’… Quoted in Weller, The Idea of Europe, 116

(104) ‘what Germany wishes to make is Germany…’ Quoted in Weller, The Idea of Europe, 117

(104) ‘all sister nations having Paris as their city and chief-place…’ Quoted in Weller, The Idea of Europe, 118

(104) ‘all it lacks to be successful is the consent of all Europe…’ Quoted in Weller, The Idea of Europe, 40

(105) ‘a shining example of the … moral unity of Europe’ quoted in Kiran Klaus Patel, A Concise History of the European Union, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2026, 12

(105) ‘Europe can only be created starting from below…’ this in a letter to Henri Fenet, quoted in a remarkable essay by Krukenberg’s grandson, the historian Peter Schöttler, in Dieter Gosewinckel, Anti-liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization, Berghahn, New York, 2015, 128-41 this on 140, the Schuman medal proposal on 141.

(106) ‘while awaiting a more distant future…’ See https://federalists.eu/federalist-library/the-ventotene-manifesto/

(106) ‘Monsieur Monnet shortened the war by a year’… Quoted in Richard Mayne, The Father of Europe: The Life and Times of Jean Monnet, edited and revised by Clifford P Hackett, Jean Monnet Council/Fondation Jean Monnet, Washington, 2018, 78

(107) ‘only be ensured if the states of Europe…’ Mayne, Father of Europe, 99

(108) ‘the European rescue of the nation-state’… Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-Sta te, Routledge, London, 1992

(108) The term ‘Cold War’ seems to have been coined… George Orwell, ‘You and the Atom Bomb’, Tribune, 19 October 1945, re-printed, with much contextual detail, in Davison, ed, Complete Works of George Orwell, 316-23

(109) ‘Let us never forget, my friends,…’ Quoted from a facsimile of the original transcript of the Congress of Europe, The Hague, 7-11 May 1948, republished by The Council of Europe in 1999. This on page 14 of the original and 16 of this facsimile.

(111) ‘five years, almost to the day,…‘ see https://www.robert-schuman.eu/declaration-du-9-mai-1950

(111) ‘Europe has never existed,…‘ Mayne, Father of Europe, 115

(112) ‘Europe of contradictions on the way to itself‘… This was the Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis No. 76, 1984

(112) actually sheaves of blank paper… see Kiran Klaus Patel, Project Europe: A History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020, 176

Chapter 6. Political Europe

(115) ‘40 years of Spain in Europe’… See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpRq3cXR6mk

(119) ‘First there’s a crisis,…' Quoted in an article by Fabrizio Tassinari in the Guardian, 20 August 2025

(119) ‘Europe will be forged in crises,…’ Translated from the French original in Jean Monnet, Mémoires, Fayard, Paris, 1976, 488. A slightly different version is given in the English translation in Jean Monnet, Memoirs, Collins, London, 1978, 417

(123) ‘one rather small club among many,’… Patel, Concise History of the European Union, 55

(125) Raymond Aron felt compelled to defend a ‘decadent Europe’… Raymond Aron, Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1977

(133) …dubbed a ‘polycrisis’… the first use of this term appears to be by Edgar Morin in his 1993 book Terre-Patrie, co-authored with Anne-Brigitte Kern, but it only came to be more widely used in the 2010s, popularised by European Council president Jean-Claude Juncker

(134) ‘today the German Bundestag will decide the fate of Greece’… Ulrich Beck, German Europe, Polity, London, 2013, 1

Chapter 7. Today's Europe

(139) ‘Nothing was left of two of them,’… See the full account in my ‘Homage to Kharkiv’, New York Review of Books, 21 November 2024

(143) In 2008, the EU’s gross domestic product per head was three quarters… thus Nouriel Roubini in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/01/trump-woke-policies-europe-economic-technological-decline citing https://econofact.org/factbrief/fact-check-has-the-economic-gap-between-europe-and-the-united-states-increased-in-the-past-decade. But Martin Sandbu, also using World Bank figures, suggests a very different story here https://www.ft.com/content/8bdb63a2-b205-4c21-80b0-4f079236d111?syn-25a6b1a6=1.

(143) ‘civilisational erasure’… see https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

(144) more than $105,000 in Switzerland, less than $22,000 in Moldova… these are 2026 IMF figures, see https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/CHE?zoom=CHE&highlight=CHE

(145) today it’s about the same as Spain’s… in fact about $600 more than Spain’s according to these 2026 IMF figures, https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/CHE?zoom=CHE&highlight=CHE. For the 1989 estimate, see https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-2020

(146) In a 2020 survey, three out of every four… see Timothy Garton Ash, ed., Young Europeans Speak to EU, Dahrendorf Programme, Oxford, 2021, 45. The exact figure is 76%. The polling was done for us by eupinions.

(151) almost $13 trillion larger… Combined gross domestic product at purchasing power parity (current international dollars), from the IMF, World Economic Outlook database (April 2025); 2025 values are IMF staff estimates. On this measure the five original BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) collectively out-produce the G7 by roughly $12.9tn. See https://www.imf.org/en/publications/weo/weo-database/2025/april

(151) In a series of global opinion polls… see the annual polls conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations, in collaboration with our Europe in a Changing World research project at the University of Oxford, at https://europeanmoments.com/changing-world/opinions

(155) …men tending more to the right, women to the left… See, for example, https://theloop.ecpr.eu/youth-and-the-new-gender-divide/ and https://www.fes.de/en/news/the-gender-gap-among-europes-young-generation-power-values-and-relationships-in-transition

Chapter 7½. Nightcap Europe

(157) ‘The religious system that produced green Chartreuse…’ This comes in his 1904 short story ‘Reginald on Christmas Presents’

(158) ‘scramble for Europe’… see Dimitar Bechev, The Scramble for Europe, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2026

(159) ‘century of humiliation’… Mark Leonard, Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail, Polity Press, London, 2026, 13

(159) ‘an ability to work for something because it is good…’ Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvíždala, Knopf, New York, 1990, 180-82