Christmas books: History

Dominic Sandbrook salutes a bumper year of imperialism, war and naval heroes

A few years ago, I gave up reading the NYT's Christmas books edition. I could never find anything on it I would pay actual money to read.

Yet, I've been profoundly influenced by British reading and book-buying "habits" during my adult years, so running across this today, I though I'd post it.

Obviously reading through this list, I can gather that the real history of today (Confessions of an Economic Hitman, Armed Madhouse) are still not going to crack much attention in the mainstream press as "must reads" or "great gifts", even though Mr. Sandbrook does note that IMPERIALISM perspective in making a comeback. And yet both books I mention are obviously bestsellers.

Basically my idea being that the modern mass culture history book is the one who takes and rewrites history that has to recast the terms and show the modern example in its authentic context, rather than the one in which one was trained in university. They tend to be somewhat more graphics oriented, as they reflect the new mass culture itself, the obsession with SEEING it is very dominant.

Maybe the trick is to move over and look at the "political" books - for to my mind ALL history writing is political. All of it. Everyone who writes history IS a product of their time(s), no matter how iconic, idiosyncratic, creative that individual writer may appear to be.

But as for the Telegraph's political Xmas book list - I think an entire section has gone missing online! And it's nowhere near as relevant as this history list.

But this is a much better list of history reads than you're gonna see in America - by a long shot. I just wonder why as there is a new historical revisionist so apparent, there is not a single book on this list that deals with "THE COLONIES".

Politics | Sport | History | Biography | Memoir | Humour | Cooking | Poetry
Fiction | Crime | Photography | Graphic novels | Celebrity
Children's illustrated | 8-12 years old | Teen fiction | Stocking fillers

'I loathe popular history," one university professor said to me recently during a radio discussion about the latest deranged scheme to focus on "concepts" not "periods" in A-level history.

	Red Mutiny is a cracking account of the uprising on Battleship Potemkin

What an odd thing for the man - a self-styled cultural historian - to say: after all, some of our greatest stylists - Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle - wrote beautifully composed histories that reached a wide audience.

And despite the advent of specialisation and postmodernism, their successors are in good nick. Will any of them last as long as Gibbon? Perhaps not; but they'll certainly keep you entertained well after the last of the turkey has gone into the freezer.

The mention of Gibbon is not coincidental. In his epic The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Jonathan Cape, £25, T £23), one of the most colourful and blood-soaked narratives of the year, Piers Brendon makes no secret of his ambition to emulate his great predecessor.

Indeed, one of his achievements is to show how, throughout all the sieges and massacres and daring raids, British imperialists often looked with deep foreboding to Gibbon's great work on the fall of Rome.

Since imperialism has been a key theme of recent historical writing, it is no surprise that the year's finest books have been immersed in the culture of empire.

John Darwin's After Tamerlane (Allen Lane, £25, T £23), an amazingly erudite history of the world since the Mongol conquests, didn't quite get the attention it deserved. But it is a sensational accomplishment, covering everything from Manchu China to Victorian Britain, and makes a powerful case that empire has been the "default position" for most of human history.

One of Darwin's more arresting arguments is that Britain's empire, compared with the realms of the Persians or the Chinese, was a blip in world history. But how did we get it in the first place?

Not by sea power, argues Brendan Simms, whose Three Victories and a Defeat (Allen Lane, £30, T £26) claims that Georgian Britain acquired its empire through diplomatic prowess on the Continent, not - as we often think - courtesy of the Royal Navy.

Some will disagree with his thesis, but there is no arguing with his scholarship, and there is no better history of British foreign policy in this crucial period.

Still, Britain's empire pales by comparison with the glories of Constantinople, where the Romans' Byzantine successors created an empire that lasted 1,000 years and bequeathed a magnificent legacy of churches. Judith Herrin's Byzantium (Allen Lane, £20, T £18) is the perfect introduction: briskly written, beautifully illustrated and a wonderfully exotic read.

Otherwise, lovers of medieval history have had slim pickings this year.

Ian Mortimer's The Fears of Henry IV (Jonathan Cape, £18.99, T £16.99) is your best bet: forensically detailed, it argues that England's Lancastrian usurper was a "model medieval magnate", and perhaps the greatest political pragmatist in our history.

For a fine example of collective biography, skip forward a couple of centuries to Adrian Tinniswood's The Verneys (Jonathan Cape, £25, T £23), which uses one aristocratic family's stash of letters to paint an evocative picture of life and attitudes during the turbulent years of Civil War, Cromwell, Restoration and revolution.

Once we cross the threshold of the 18th century, however, famine turns into glut. Vast, learned and gorgeously illustrated, Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory (Allen Lane, £30, T £26), a survey of European history from 1648 to 1815, strikes a nice balance between the Enlightenment's optimistic rationalism and the mud-soaked reality of everyday life.

Meanwhile, Ben Wilson's hilarious Decency and Disorder (Faber & Faber, £25, T £23) plunges us into the heart of the "Age of Cant", a seething world of high-society scandals, moralists and hypocrites, poised uneasily between Regency excess and Victorian propriety.

At the time, the survival of what one of Wilson's jostling aristocrats called our "great blackguard country" depended upon victory against Napoleon's France, and the battle against Boney has been a popular topic this year.

Paul Strathern's Napoleon in Egypt (Jonathan Cape, £20, T £18) provides an engaging narrative of an exotic but rather shambolic campaign, while Noel Mostert's The Line Upon a Wind (Jonathan Cape, £25, T £18) is an epic history of the longest, cruelest sea war ever fought, lit up by Nelson's genius.

But by far the best Napoleonic history is Charles Esdaile's Napoleon's Wars (Allen Lane, £30, T £26). Deft, authoritative, often strikingly counter-intuitive, this is the definitive word on the subject, giving a clear-eyed view of the great dictator - who, whatever Johnny Frenchman might say, was the most awful scoundrel, and ugly to boot.

Back on home turf, Jerry White's London in the 19th Century (Jonathan Cape, £20, T £18), provides a dazzling portrait of the capital in all its seething Dickensian pomp, from whores and barrow boys to poets and politicians.

It makes a splendid companion to Peter Ackroyd's Thames (Chatto & Windus, £25, T £18), an imaginative history of the river with an eclectic cast: not many authors can handle Julius Caesar, Henry VIII, Three Men in a Boat and Toad of Toad Hall with such admirable aplomb.

Christian Wolmar's Fire and Steam (Atlantic, £19.99, T £14.99), a polemical history of the railways that transformed London, knitted the nation together and gave the world the British Rail sandwich, will have even the most jaded commuter leafing through the Hornby catalogue, such is Wolmar's enthusiasm for his subject.

Many of the year's finest history books ventured further from home. I read nothing pithier than R F Foster's Luck and the Irish (Allen Lane, £20, T £18), which shows how Ireland cast off the shackles of Catholic nationalism in the age of the Celtic Tiger, and demolishes more than a few myths along the way.

Myth-busters will also enjoy Kathleen Burk's Old World, New World (Little, Brown, £25, T £23), a magnificent saga of Anglo-American relations from the first colonies to the invasion of Iraq, full of choice anecdotes and characters.

For the most compelling American character of them all, turn to Conrad Black's Richard Milhous Nixon (Quercus, £30, T £26), a gloriously overwritten story of ambition, drive, disgrace and redemption.

Perhaps Nixon's greatest achievement was his trip to Moscow in 1972, and in recent years dozens of historians have been following in his footsteps.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's superb Young Stalin (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25, T £23) gives us a terrifying portrait of the future tyrant in the violent reaches of the Caucasus, brawling and brooding in the dying days of Tsarist Russia.

His victims, meanwhile, speak out in Orlando Figes's chilling The Whisperers (Allen Lane, £25, T £23), a heartbreaking account of life in Stalin's empire, based on hundreds of family archives and written with great style and sympathy.

No less riveting, but less depressing, is Neal Bascomb's Red Mutiny (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20, T £18), a cracking account of the uprising on the Battleship Potemkin, which I enjoyed even more than Sergei Eisenstein's great film.

If the world wars had never happened, publishers would have had to invent them.

Still, there are pearls amid the dross, one example being Norman Stone's World War One (Allen Lane, £16.99, T £14.99), which manages to blend brevity with sweep, and sparkles with telling facts and unorthodox opinions.

Hats off, too, to Sir Ian Kershaw, whose magisterial Fateful Choices (Allen Lane, £30, T £26), written with typical wisdom, skill and insight, takes a close look at the 10 key decisions that shaped the Second World War.

Another knight of the realm is on top form in Max Hastings's Nemesis (HarperPress, £25, T £23), an outstandingly gripping and authoritative account of the battle for Japan, and a monument to human bravery – and savagery.

As for modern Britain, my advice is to steer clear of books by failed politicians or television personalities, and to tuck into David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (Bloomsbury, £25, T £23), a hugely enjoyable history of the Attlee years based on the letters and diaries of ordinary people across the country, and definitely one to bring back memories both fond and wistful.

Vulgar uncles might also like Mina Gorji's Rude Britannia (Routledge, £16.99, T £14.99), a collection of essays on everything from the rise of Page Three to the changing nature of football chants.

Finally, what better to fill that gap between the roast turkey and the Doctor Who Christmas special than Kate Colquhoun's Taste (Bloomsbury, £20, T £18), a mouth-watering history of British cooking from Anglo-Saxon puddings of pigs' guts to the soggy boiled greens of the 1950s?

How about a proper Tudor Christmas dinner of "capons and Hennes… Turkies, Geese and Duckes", as well as apples and cheese, "plumbs and Spice, Sugar and Honey"? But then, like me, you probably have that every year.

No less riveting, but less depressing, is Neal Bascomb's Red Mutiny (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20, T £18), a cracking account of the uprising on the Battleship Potemkin, which I enjoyed even more than Sergei Eisenstein's great film.

If the world wars had never happened, publishers would have had to invent them.

Still, there are pearls amid the dross, one example being Norman Stone's World War One (Allen Lane, £16.99, T £14.99), which manages to blend brevity with sweep, and sparkles with telling facts and unorthodox opinions.

Hats off, too, to Sir Ian Kershaw, whose magisterial Fateful Choices (Allen Lane, £30, T £26), written with typical wisdom, skill and insight, takes a close look at the 10 key decisions that shaped the Second World War.

Another knight of the realm is on top form in Max Hastings's Nemesis (HarperPress, £25, T £23), an outstandingly gripping and authoritative account of the battle for Japan, and a monument to human bravery – and savagery.

As for modern Britain, my advice is to steer clear of books by failed politicians or television personalities, and to tuck into David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (Bloomsbury, £25, T £23), a hugely enjoyable history of the Attlee years based on the letters and diaries of ordinary people across the country, and definitely one to bring back memories both fond and wistful.

Vulgar uncles might also like Mina Gorji's Rude Britannia (Routledge, £16.99, T £14.99), a collection of essays on everything from the rise of Page Three to the changing nature of football chants.

Finally, what better to fill that gap between the roast turkey and the Doctor Who Christmas special than Kate Colquhoun's Taste (Bloomsbury, £20, T £18), a mouth-watering history of British cooking from Anglo-Saxon puddings of pigs' guts to the soggy boiled greens of the 1950s?

How about a proper Tudor Christmas dinner of "capons and Hennes… Turkies, Geese and Duckes", as well as apples and cheese, "plumbs and Spice, Sugar and Honey"? But then, like me, you probably have that every year.