Review: Shadowplay: Behind the Lines and Under Fire: The Inside Story of Europe’s Last War, by Tim Marshall (2019)
I first came across Tim Marshall through Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics , his outstanding book on geopolitics. I enjoyed it so much, I quickly picked up his book on vexillology, Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags . What made these books so good was that they provided fresh perspectives on the contemporary world, which subsequently stuck with me long after I put them down. Whenever I saw a country’s flag, or read about an international conflict in the news, something that Marshall said in his books would pop into my head, providing useful context that helped me understand what I was seeing and reading. Shadowplay is a different sort of book, both in its subject matter and structure. There is no mention of flags, and references to geopolitics are relatively limited (notwithstanding an interesting discussion concerning a potential land swap between Kosovo and Serbia in the conclusion. Plus, fans of cartogra