This ambitious and demanding book takes in not only the entire sweep of German and Polish history, but at times also that of Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. The struggle for Breslau, it emerges, has been a contest between German and Pole; Habsburg and Hohenzollern; Hussite heretic and Catholic; Catholic and Lutheran; Jew and anti-semite; patrician and magnate; socialist and capitalist; Nazi and Soviet; apparatchik and dissident. And yet, as Davies and Moorhouse stress, this story was often as much one of co-operation and coexistence as of conflict and annihilation. "Microcosm" is not a short book, but the sheer extent of the years and changes it traverses justifies every line; it could even have been a little fuller towards the end.

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