THE MOST BEAUTIFUL history book of the year is Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 (Yale, £19.99/offer £17.99). Eamon Duffy examines surviving copies of the Book of Hours, the most intimate book of the late Middle Ages, tracing the marks left by readers — everything from laundry lists scribbled in the margins to personalised versions of prayers. This richly illustrated book takes us back into the hearts and souls of the English long ago.

Antonia Fraser’s Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25/£22.50) considers piety in very different circumstances: the opulent court of 17th-century France, where God’s representative on Earth strove to reconcile his devotional duties with love affairs and sexual adventures.Fraser brilliantly reconstructs the politics and religion of a lost time. Her generosity and sympathy bring the Sun King and his court vividly to life.

Adam Sisman’s The Friendship (HarperCollins, £20/ £18) charts the tempestuous relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, who used the term “friend” as “a very sacred appellation”. Sisman judiciously assesses the real exchange between the poets, which had a dramatic impact on the history of literature.

Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911 (John Murray, £20/£18) is elegantly poignant. Following the path blazed by Alethea Hayter’s 1965 masterpiece A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846, the author pieces together a collage of perspectives from the sweltering summer when Britain moved towards the brink of the First World War. Nicolson has an eye for prescient anecdotes.

One of the most extraordinary comes when Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, observes the Kaiser arriving at Westminster to pay his respects to the late King Edward VII lying in state. She thinks “what a terrifying result a bomb thrown from Big Ben would have had upon that assemblage”.

Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25/ £22.50) is a riveting account of a deeply complex struggle in the years before the Second World War. Some supporters of the Republic still believe that victory for the Left in Spain would have defeated fascism and changed history.

An earlier version of this appeared in 1982, but a wealth of new material has since surfaced. It is to Beevor’s great credit that he has comprehensively revised his work in its light. That is what historians should do, but often don’t.

Peter Hennessy’s Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (Allen Lane, £30/£26.99) is a masterful synthesis of political and cultural history. Hennessy moves seamlessly between middle-class sitting-rooms where families gathered to watch the Coronation on television, to the secret Cabinet rooms where decisions about Britain’s nuclear bomb were made. One of the book’s haunting illustrations is the mushroom cloud generated by “ Grapple X”’ the first British-made H-bomb, tested off Christmas Island in 1959.

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20/£18) provides a less panoramic, but more personal, portrait of the 1950s.

In 1947, at the age of 82, the art critic Berenson extracted a promise of correspondence from the promising historian, then 33. Trevor-Roper kept his promise until Berenson died in 1959. The letters give a special insight into Trevor-Roper’s career, the development of his literary skills and his encounters with the luminaries of his age, such as Evelyn Waugh, Isaiah Berlin, A. L. Rowse and A. J. P. Taylor. Full of gossip, intellect and humour, these letters must have delighted Berenson and are now precious documents in their own right.

A Death in Belmont (Fourth Estate, £14.99/£13.49) is the long awaited book from Sebastian Junger, author of A Perfect Storm. Junger is a wonderfully quirky narrative historian. The cover reproduces a family photograph from 1963: Junger, at the age of 1, sits on his mother’s lap with his father and a carpenter, who had been working in their Boston home, in the background.

The picture was taken to celebrate the completion of the carpenter’s work. What the Jungers did not know was that the previous day the carpenter, Al DeSalvo, had raped and strangled a housewife in Belmont, and let an innocent black cleaner take the blame.

Junger grippingly tells the story of the murder and the lives damaged in its wake, creating a memorable portrait of 1960s America and the troubling race relations that prefigured the death of Martin Luther King. At its worst, history makes us over-familiar with death. It is salutary to be reminded of the historical weight of just one murder.

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