Double Exposure

The historian Mary Beard began SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, her acclaimed 2015 book, by pointing out that our understanding of historical people and places evolves with “new ways of looking at the old evidence, and the different questions we choose to put to it.” Even as she would present ancient Rome in a very new light, she attempted to steer her readers away from the “dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.” By examining the evidence with a different set of priorities — in her case things like gender identity and food ­supply — historians simply ask the past to “speak to us in a new idiom.”

The writer Mary Soderstrom, perhaps best known for her novels and short stories, has likewise pursued a new idiom with her book Frenemy Nations. It’s a transdisciplinary and sometimes surprising comparison of adjacent polities, which Soderstrom treats almost as siblings, even twins. If neighbouring societies share so much in...