One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914 by David James Smith
A group biography of the circle around Gavrilo Princip, the young Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, cannot fail to fascinate. On June 28, 1914, the diminutive nationalist's attempt to end 500 years of Serbian oppression gave the Great Powers the excuse they needed to start the first world war and unwittingly made him one of the greatest antiheroes of all time. The tensions in the Balkans at this period suggest that if Princip had not struck the spark, someone else would have. David James Smith's achievement is to contextualise the conspiracy and to give incisive portraits of the other seven would-be assassins, particularly the fervent socialist Danilo Ilic and Mehmed Mehmedbasic, a Muslim carpenter and the only conspirator who wasn't caught. An informative and nuanced account, even if Smith's habit of using no paragraph longer than a few sentences occasionally makes the book read like a succession of bullet points (Weidenfeld £18.99 pp352)

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley
We all know the best philosophers are dead philosophers, but Simon Critchley contends that the circumstances of a thinker's death and dying might themselves be instructive. Heidegger - who began a lecture on Aristotle, “He was born at such and such a time, he worked and he died” -- would disagree. The death of Socrates provides Critchley's test case. Despite the man's reactionary politics, his hemlock quaffing is read as a grand stance against authoritarianism. But how exactly does Kierkegaard's putative tuberculosis, say, illuminate anything? Montaigne, the book's guiding spirit, died “after an attack of quinsy that completely deprived him of speech”. This fact is awful, not instructive. Critchley is a persuasive writer, but this book, though amusing, overworks its theme to the point of absurdity; 190 philosophers each get a paragraph or two on the circumstances of their passing. Cumulatively, I imagine, an argument is meant to appear. It does not (Granta £15.99 pp334)

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