This year we've remembered to think a little more subtly about what voices go on record and why. When Barack Obama accepted the biggest job in history with three Greco-Roman words, “Liberty, Democracy and Opportunity”, we were also shown a pleased-as-punch interview with an African-American, a centenarian born of a slave mother. It has taken four generations for her story to register.

Ignoring grassroots is not a failing we can level at Herodotus. The “father of history” made it his business in the 5th century BC to gather data on the ground across the Eastern Mediterranean. His vivid accounts mean that as readers we can be in two times at once. With Justin Marozzi's intervention in The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus (John Murray, £25/offer £22.50) we are transported to a third dimension. Herodotus is Marozzi's tour-guide - he reminds us (2,500 years on) that globalism is about the communication, not the corporatisation, of the world's community. From a bunker in Iraq to a farewell on Mount Athos, Marozzi proves a gracious travel-companion.

Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac (Norton, 16.99/£15.29), looks at the flip-side of cross-cultural influence. Both authors are journalists and are therefore canny to the fact that force of character burns geo-political boundaries. However strategic we are, most global decisions are taken by a few men (and fewer women). Whoever argues his or her case best will win the day. This book reminds us that international interventionism will always mean that one day someone else's tears will run down our own face.

Clio - the muse of history - is back on form. Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France by Agnès Humbert (Bloomsbury, £14.99/£13.49) is a journal of a woman of the French Resistance, imprisoned and then sent as slave labour to Germany, and has only now been translated into English. An artist's eye, a woman's tongue and a mischievous spirit add up to the most unlikely and vivid account of the ordinariness of evil; “Seven and a half hours of interrogation have given me a healthy appetite.” The true horror of war is revealed when humans share a joke before they torture and kill.

If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...

Michael Parkinson, Sheila Hancock, Roger Moore, Elaine Paige and Andrew Castle pick out some perfect reading for the festive period

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We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars (The Bodley Head, £20/£18) by Martin Pugh is an important history - a past time as lived, not as pigeon-holed. Pugh's account of an age in which intelligence documents accuse Wallis Simpson of entrapping Edward with sexual practices from the Far East, when the new fad of motoring and sunbathing killed as many as any battle and when we danced in the streets, is buoyant and brilliant.

In The Raven King: Matthias Corvinus and the Fate of his Lost Library (Yale University Press, £20/ £18), Marcus Tanner has written the juvenile “Raven King” back into history. This presciently cultured young man (15 when he seized the Hungarian throne) gathered manuscripts from across Christendom - his ambition to copy and possess every work of antiquity. When Hungary fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1490 the collection was dispersed: a reminder that power is ownership of knowledge.

It is about time there was a renaissance in Civil War studies. Familiarity has bred such contempt. Civil strife, where friends could eat dinner together one week and starve one another to death the next, is the greatest of all cautionary tales. In God's Fury, England's Fire (Allen Lane, £30/£27), Michael Braddick's acute understanding of the primary sources allows him to set up some of the “what ifs?” of the period - when other, radical outcomes were once England's future.

This year the Royal Academy of Arts brought us Byzantium (£27.95 from royalacademy.org.uk) and the British Museum dreamed and chronicled Babylon: Myth and Reality (ed. I.L. Finkel and M.J. Seymour, £25/£22.50). Their catalogues might be picture books - but what better way to introduce two intensely visual cultures? Both carry chapters by scholars who have been working for decades in relatively arcane fields (for example, Byzantine foreign policy and maths problems on Babylonian cuneiform) - which we need to read if we are to comprehend the state we are now in. The Byzantine civilisation - although systematically written out of history since the 18th century - is key to understanding the current religious and political make-up of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Babylonians divided time in to portions of 60, so we mark out our lives to a Babylonian beat.

A final chapter on modern-day Iraq in Babylon shows Saddam's gross palace overlooking Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian ruins (both rulers fired their names into the bricks themselves) now circled by the allied helicopters whose army base squashes the Tower of Babel. Originally called Etemenanki “The Foundation of Heaven and Earth”, Babel has witnessed hell on earth. What a Christmas present it will be if the Iraq that Herodotus witnessed, “in magnificence there is no other city that approaches it... no other country more fruitful” can start to stumble back into the light.

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