Sure, it’s the size and weight of a house brick, it might be the only book you take to Greece or Italy and you almost certainly won’t finish it while you’re there, but John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy (Simon & Schuster, £30; Buy this book) is, for me, the publishing event of the summer. While others waste time on the beach, look cool in the taverna, reaching between the striking black and white covers to find out where democracy came from, the weird ways in which it sometimes developed, and where it might be headed, all told with boisterous enthusiasm and a great ear for anecdote. A graduate-magnet.

If overview is your thing and Keane is too much, then put The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson (Penguin, £9.99; Buy this book) in your knapsack, walk to the top of a high Austrian hill and allow Ferguson to waft you over the world of dosh. From South American gold and silver mines to the subprime mortgage crisis, he explains how we developed banks and lending, how we got to the credit crunch, and how we will again.

More tactful, perhaps, to read Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War II (Penguin, £9.99; Buy this book) when in the US than in Germany. Second World War military and political strategy and the relationships between Churchill and Roosevelt are pretty well covered by other books, you may think, but by making the two leaders share the stage with their Chiefs of Staff, the long-suffering Alan Brooke and his US equivalent George Marshall, Roberts finds new things to say about that most existential of conflicts, and about how close-run a thing it was.

While I’m feeling magisterial I recommend one of those books that takes a slice of time, rather than an event or country, and shows how nations and peoples thousands of miles from each other rocked each other’s universes. In The Great Upheaval: The Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 (Pocket Books, £9.99; Buy this book) the American historian Jay Winik travels from the Ottoman border with Catherine the Great’s Russia to the new America, taking in the French Revolution en route, all with a liveliness and attention to character that banishes boredom.

The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads

Choose from a rich haul of novels and thrillers (including two prizewinners) or fill your mind with the sharpest new nonfiction

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• Summer reading: fiction roundup

• Summer reading: children's books

• Summer reading: audio books

• Summer reading

Summer reading

The Sunday Times top 12 choices in fiction and nonfiction

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Summer reading: fiction

A perfect day would start in the winding streets of Barcelona and end with a classic Agatha Christie mystery

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• Erica Wagner chooses her favourite summer books

• David Aaronovitch reviews the best history books for your holiday reading

• Tim Teeman reviews the best books to take on holiday

• Val McDermid reviews the latest thrillers

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• Summer reading for children

• Summer reading: biography/memoir

• Lisa Tuttle reviews the latest science fiction and fantasy novels

• Summer reading: fiction that you loved on vacation

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• Summer reading: music

• Summer reading: outdoors

• Summer reading: travel

• Summer listening: audiobooks

And now for the books that are more specific, more local in ambition, but brilliant nonetheless. I enjoyed every page of Andy Beckett’s account of our recent past, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in The Seventies (Faber and Faber, £20; Buy this book). Written over four years, the book shows real wit and insight into a muchmaligned period of British history. Unlike most historians Beckett also revisited the places where it happened and some of the people (several managing to keep from expiring until just after talking to the author) to whom it happened. From Maplin to Saltley Gates, the half-remembered geography of the past takes shape again.

Much the same could be said for Stefan Aust’s The Baader-Meinhof Complex (The Bodley Head, £12.99; Buy this book), whose events took place in Germany at the same time as those in Beckett’s book, but almost all of whose protagonists were dead by their own hands on one night in 1977. Tersely told, with a minimum of extraneous detail, the book helps the reader to understand how one of the most civilised of postwar European states could have given birth to some of the most fanatical and pointless acts of individual terror on the part of wealthy and educated young people.

My classic is a modern one, a book that so beautifully and convincingly combines an individual story with events so terrible and huge that it is practically a model of the genre. I was working on the final stages of my book about the history of conspiracy theories when I read Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland by Carmen Callil (Vintage, £9.99; Buy this book). Callil’s is the story of the interwar boulevardier and conman Louis Darquier de Pellepoix and how he went from being an almost comic figure to Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in Vichy France, responsible for the arrest and transportation of thousands of Jews. One of the key factors in allowing this transition was his belief in that egregious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, still available (hopefully not for much longer) on an Iranian TV channel near you.

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch is published by Jonathan Cape, £17.99

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